The Research Center for Digital Humanities (hereafter “the Center”) is a university-level research unit established upon more than a decade of sustained development of diverse digital resources and accumulated technical expertise at the university. Founded in 2007 under the original name Research Center for Digital Archives, it was officially renamed the Research Center for Digital Humanities in 2012.
One of the Center’s core missions is the digitization of collections and the construction of research databases. In addition to continuing the digital preservation of unique, time-sensitive, and fragile treasures held by National Taiwan University, the Center has extended its work outward to important cultural heritage materials both domestically and internationally. To date, more than 40 large-scale digital humanities contextual analysis systems have been developed, encompassing over 7 million metadata records, nearly 30 million images, over 600 million characters of full text, and hundreds of hours of audiovisual materials. These resources span Taiwan’s history, politics, society, law, and economy, covering four centuries of Taiwanese history, largely through primary historical sources. The Center is not only one of Taiwan’s most comprehensive digital archival institutions but also the world’s largest and most unique repository of Taiwan-related research materials.
The historical materials collected across these research databases are highly distinctive, significant, unique, and time-sensitive. They are openly accessible to researchers and have had profound impact across the humanities and in fields such as historical document studies, where they have been widely applied. By integrating a “post-retrieval categorization” approach with data mining and analytical tools, the Center emphasizes the holistic structure of query results, enabling researchers to analyze and visualize relationships and contextual patterns through categorization and statistical methods. The Center has also developed more than 20 knowledge discovery and visualization tools, enhancing the quality and efficiency of humanities research and advancing the field of digital humanities.
In addition to ongoing work in digitization, database construction, and tool development, the Center aims to move beyond traditional database search habits by employing information technologies that help users observe, interpret, and uncover relationships among data. This approach serves as the conceptual foundation for establishing digital humanities methodologies and academic inquiry.
Key Missions
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Establish the field of digital humanities research
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Construct essential digital resources (historical materials) for humanities research
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Develop theories, systems, technologies, and tools required for digital humanities
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Initiate and advance the study of digital humanities in Taiwan
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Promote international collaboration in digital archives and digital humanities