One of the primary focuses of the Center is the digitization of collections and database construction. It continuously digitizes significant, unique, timely, and vulnerable cultural assets owned by National Taiwan University (NTU) and extends its efforts to important cultural assets nationally and internationally. The Center has established more than 40 large-scale digital humanities context analysis systems containing over 7 million metadata records, nearly 30 million images, over 600 million words of full-text, and hundreds of hours of audio-visual materials. These resources cover various aspects of Taiwan's history, politics, society, law, economics, etc., spanning four centuries of Taiwanese history. The majority of the materials are primary historical sources, making the Center one of the most enriched digital repositories in Taiwan and one of the world's largest accumulations of Taiwan research data.
The databases contain unique, important, and timely historical documents, providing researchers with valuable resources. The Center's databases have had a profound impact on academic research in history, politics, and the study of ancient documents, contributing to the fields of humanities and Taiwan studies.
In addition to the ongoing digitization efforts and database construction, the Center has developed over 20 knowledge mining and presentation tools to enhance the quality and efficiency of humanities research. These tools, along with a focus on "post-classification" retrieval methods and information mining and analysis techniques, emphasize the overall results of searches and analyze relationships and contexts. The development of new information acquisition and analysis methods continues to drive the progress of digital humanities.
The Center's mission includes not only digitization and database construction but also the development of research tools and methods for digital humanities. By breaking the habit of users solely searching databases, the Center provides users with tools to further explore possible contexts within the data, laying the foundation for the development of digital humanities research methods and disciplines.
Key Areas of Work:
- Establishing the field of digital humanities research
- Building the necessary digital data (historical materials) for humanities research
- Developing theories, systems, technologies, and tools for digital humanities
- Pioneering and promoting digital humanities research in Taiwan
- Promoting international cooperation in digital collections and digital humanities