This essay provides an overview of the goals, main features, and digital tools of the Ming Qing Women's Writings (MQWW) project, which contains more than 400 collections of literary writings by women (17th – early 20th centuries). The website (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/) makes accessible a free archive of scanned images of texts with searchable components and a downloadable database. It highlights MQWW's functionalities and actual and potential applications for literary, biographical, and historical research.

Biographies constitute the main historical record of China. The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is an important project that tackles this vast biographical material with digital technologies. With both online and offline versions, CBDB is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis, as well as serving as biographical reference. Through the wide range of data it collects through mining historical texts and reference sources, CBDB offers multiple ways to examine the lives of past groups and individuals in Chinese history. The use of CBDB data for prosopographical and other types of analysis has generated important work that interprets Chinese history in new ways, and has also fostered new forms of digital humanities collaborations. This article introduces the history of the CBDB project and its methods for populating its biographical data. It also presents the ways that historians and other scholars could utilize its data for research and teaching.

A brief introduction to historical Geographic Information Systems and the creation of the China Historical GIS. Introductions are given to the CHGIS datasets covering 221 BCE to 1911 and the many GIS datasets on nineteenth and twentieth century China created under the leadership of the late G. William Skinner.

MARKUS, a multilingual digital text annotation and analysis platform, allows historians and other researchers to construct datasets from primary sources available to them in full-text digital format. Originally designed for those working with pre-twentieth-century Chinese texts, MARKUS has developed into a multifunctional annotation platform that is particularly suited for the automated annotation, referencing, and visualization of named entities in modern and literary Chinese and premodern Korean texts, but many of its additional annotation features can be used to analyze and read texts in any language, as long as the electronic documents are encoded in the most common standard for language encoding, Unicode. Below I discuss the main goals and methodological features of MARKUS and the allied text comparison utility COMPARATIVUS. I will illustrate these with some examples of how MARKUS has been used in Chinese and Korean historical research.

The Shiji (史記 Records of the Grand Historian) is of great value for Chinese history before 90 BCE. Many online databases provide character-based search of the Shiji. We go beyond simple search by creating an word-based open-access database of the Basic Annals (本纪) of the Shiji that allows the exploration of relationships between persons and the relationships between persons and named places.

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project offers a modern digital solution to an age-old scholarly problem: a platform for annotating source texts for easy reference and retrieval, while facilitating easy access to original sources. Individuals or groups can upload scans of primary sources and annotate over the image, in multiple layers, toggling annotations on or off per research and reading needs. The project is hosted by Yale University.

This article gives an overview of the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), including its development, technical features, methodology, and examples of research applications by members of the Tu 圖 working group. The use of LoGaRT is illustrated with four brief introductions to projects that draw on visual materials from the local gazetteers, including ritual-related illustrations, city layout maps, and maps with western cartographic features. See the websites for more detailed information on LoGaRT and other research projects using it.1

What does it mean to be able to study Chinese history at scale? What methods, tools, and approaches will allow us to understand Chinese history and historiography from a larger perspective over the longue durée, including linguistic, philosophical, ethnographic, and literary concerns? In this article we present what we feel is one potential key to answering these questions and provide an overview of the utility and value of harnessing this framework for text-based historical research as a means to expand one's scholarship to virtually limitless scales.

DocuSky is a personal digital humanities platform for humanities scholars, which aims to become a platform on which a scholar can satisfy all her digital needs with no direct IT assistance. To this end, DocuSky provides tools for a scholar to download material from the Web and prepare (annotating, building metadata) her material, a one-click function to build a full-text searchable database, and tools for analysis and visualization. DocuSky advocates the separation of digital content and tools. Being an open platform, it encourages IT developers to build tools to suit scholars’ needs, and it has already incorporated several popular Web resources and external tools into its environment. Interoperability is ensured through the format DocuXML. In addition to describing the design principles of DocuSky, we will show its main features, together with several important tools and examples. DocuSky was originally developed for Sinological studies. We are enriching it to work in other languages.