I.              Introduction

“Digital Humanities” International Cooperation Alliance is a project advanced by the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (IAS), Nanjing University. It aims to build the first domestic Digital Humanities platform for scientific research, teaching, and publication. Moreover, the alliance eager to cultivate a group of intellects who hold critical thinking, the ability of data analysis, interdisciplinary knowledge background, and to publish widely influential Digital Humanities research and works.

II.           International Cooperation Alliance

China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) | Harvard University

The China Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 470,000 individuals as of May 2020, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries. With both online and offline versions, the data is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis as well as serving as a kind of biographical reference.

St Benet’s Hall | University of Oxford

St Benet's Hall has been in existence as a Hall of the University of Oxford for well over a hundred years.  It was founded in 1897 as a place for the monks of Ampleforth Abbey and other monasteries to live while they read for Oxford degrees. Twenty years later (1918) it became a Permanent Private Hall of the University.  Today St Benet's Hall matriculates undergraduates and graduate students of all faiths and none into the University to study a range of subjects across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Dr. Pieter Francois is a leading scholar in the field of Digital Humanities with a particular strength in designing large-scale collaborative projects. He is especially interested in fostering such a consilience between the disciplines of history, cultural evolution and the digital humanities.

Research Center for Digital Humanities | National Taiwan University

The Research center for Digital Humanities is committed to creating a complete digital research environment. The center also conducts research and continues to digitally preserve Taiwan’s important, unique and delicate cultural artifacts and historical resources. After the initial task of digitalization is complete, the center’s resources will be devoted to promoting research and digital information exchange.

The center has already established 35 databases which comprise over 7,000,000 digital annotations (metadata), 30,000,000 images and 600 million words of original texts including Chinese documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties as well as old deeds of Taiwan. Also included are statistical reports and court archives from the period of Japanese occupation, archives of the Kuomintang (KMT) party, archives of the Taiwan Consultative Council and other institutes, newspaper clippings and old photographs. All of these materials showcase Taiwan’s abundant cultural heritage and enable researchers to investigate Taiwanese history from different perspectives.

Not only does the center continue to expand its range of digital information, but it also dedicates resources to developing and implementing research tools in order to improve the effectiveness of information search and retrieval.

These tasks are facilitated by the center’s tools such as the local Officials chart of Taiwan during the Qing Dynasty, Chinese-Gregorian Calendar Converter, term frequency analysis, multi-facet classification, chronicled distribution to enhance the range of research approaches.

The mission of the center is to incorporate information technologies into research in order to minimize the time and energy spent for data researching. This enables more time to be dedicated to comparative studies thereby extending research horizons to incorporate new knowledge and perspectives. The application of information technologies frees researchers in the humanities to explore, correlate and discover research possibilities, essentially assisting individuals to form their research inquiry as well as promoting new research methods.

The center welcomes criticism or suggestions for improvement in order to increase the links between digital archives and humanities. It is the hope that the center will become a hub of information exchange, holding workshops, seminars and sponsored debates on a wide range of topics and in doing so invite contributions from notable academicians.