DHAsia Hands-On Clinic | Markus and Visus: Linking and Visualizing Data in the Chinese Humanities, with Hilde De Weerdt

How can researchers and students in Chinese Studies best take advantage of existing biographical databases, historical geographic datasets, and dictionaries in analysing their own text collections? In this workshop Professor De Weerdt will introduce the thinking behind and the functionality of two digital text analysis platforms designed for the customized automated annotation of Chinese texts and the analysis and visualization of the resulting data.

The first part of the workshop focuses on the main functionality of the MARKUS platform including the automated and manual mark-up of default named entities and user-generated tags, keyword discovery, genre-specific mark-up, close reading tools including linked reference materials, and data export.

We will also take a look at new features including text import from external text databases and an automated learning module in which MARKUS can be trained to obtain higher accuracy and greater recall. Participants are encouraged to bring sample texts (preferably in non-simplified Chinese characters) with them.
In the second part of the workshop we will discuss how the various types of data marked up in MARKUS can be explored in the associated data visualization platform. Both MARKUS and VISUS are platforms designed by Brent Ho and Hilde De Weerdt at Leiden University.
The workshop will cover methods for both close and distant reading of digital texts that are broadly applicable to a variety of languages and across disciplines.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although focused on the Chinese case, the analytical approaches examined here are valuable for scholars working across Asia, on all time periods.