Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS

Abstract

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.

Development and application of a digital humanities research platform for biographies of Malaysian personalities

“…Until recently, numerous digital humanities tools commonly applied NER to develop digital humanities tools to support digital humanities research. For example, the MARKUS text analysis platform developed by Leiden University in The Netherlands is an online text annotation tool that allows its users to upload text and select the type of annotation required, and the system will automatically annotate proprietary terms, such as people, places and official names, while also providing users with external references from the resources, such as Wikipedia, CBDB, TGAZ and ZDict (De Weerdt, 2020; Ho, 2015). Yohan et al (2014) proposed a rule-based NER and classification system that can automatically identify named entities in the text and provide them with appropriate categories corresponding to the Telugu language.…”

Constructing a crowdsourced linked open knowledge base of Chinese history

“…While the annotation data is stored using an XML representation which can be directly edited, most annotations are created by using a point-and-click interface (Fig. 1), which builds upon interface design approaches used in existing annotation systems such as Recogito [2] and MARKUS [3]. Sections of text are loaded from the digital library using its Application Programming Interface (API) and displayed in the main part of the screen.…”