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Description

Drugs across Asia examines the distribution of drug knowledge across multiple genres, sources, periods, and regions of China as part of an ongoing investigation into pre-modern plural medicine (Stanley-Baker & Ho, 2015). The tools it produces allow for broader applications, enabling researchers to track any kind of knowledge that can be identified by a representative vocabulary set (in this case, 12,000 traditional Chinese drug terms). Using new methods of post-search-classification (PSC), the engine called Docusky developed by National Taiwan University in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, refines these term distributions according to detailed bibliographic meta-data. Researchers can sort search results by time, genre, author and geographic site of production. They can then use a suite of online tools for more refined study, including MARKUS, Palladio and DocuGIS. MARKUS, based in Leiden University, draws on multiple online geographical and biographical historical databases, such as Harvard’s China Historical GIS (CHGIS) and China Biographical Database (CBDB), as well as Dharma Drum’s Place and Name authority databases. Using Stanford’s Palladio, proximity between texts can be visualized from custom result outputs generated in Docusky. In DocuGIS, locations in marked-up texts can be rendered as geographical maps with dynastic map underlays, produced by Academia Sinica. This suite intersects the cutting edge of digital Sinology, clustering together techniques and tools that have been developed around the world within a closely coordinated digital ecology, to allow for a new generation of analyses of pre-modern source texts. By November 2018, this project will post the entire Buddhist and Daoist canons, and nearly 200 chapters of marked texts from the Six Dynasties (220–589 ce).

Researcher(s)

• Michael Stanley-Baker
  School of Humanities