Setup:
Some parts of the material that will be covered in the session are available in step-by-step tutorials, which also include other details and examples and might be useful if you want to come back to the material later:
- Recommended web browsers: Firefox or Chrome; Safari and Edge should also work for most tasks, but have not been fully tested.
- Create a ctext account and log in
- Check your e-mail (and spam folder) for an e-mail sent from the system, and click the link in the e-mail to validate your account.
- Go to “Settings” at the bottom left, enter the API key specified in the live session in the box under “API key”, and click “Save”
- Install the Text Tools plugin by opening this link, and then clicking “Install”
- Install the Annotation plugin by opening this link, and then clicking “Install”
- [Optional / for interest only] Install the experimental Graph plugin by opening this link, and then clicking “Install”
- Practical introduction to ctext.org – interactive guide to core functionality of the Chinese Text Project.
- Text Tools for ctext.org – interactive guide to using the Text Tools plugin for the Chinese Text Project for text mining and data visualization.
- Data Wiki tutorial – interactive guide to using the Data Wiki.
- the posts on text reuse and regular expressions on Digital Sinology.
- SPARQL querying for ctext.org data – an introduction to querying ctext data using the industry standard SPARQL query language.
- Classical Chinese Digital Humanities (on Digital Sinology) – step-by-step guide to getting started with programming in Python, and accessing the CTP API for simple text mining.
These parts of the ctext.org instructions should also be useful:
- Editing linked texts
- Wiki formatting rules
- Semantic annotation
- Annotation plugin
- AI generated aligned translations (new 2026)
- Text Wiki [Direct link to this new Wiki section (requires login)] (new 2026)
Related work:
- Crowdsourcing the Historical Record: Creating Linked Open Data for Chinese History at Scale, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 16:1, 2022.
- Constructing a crowdsourced linked open knowledge base of Chinese history, Pacific Neighborhood Consortium Conference 2021.
- Digitizing Premodern Text with the Chinese Text Project, Journal of Chinese History 2020, 4(2).
- Chinese Text Project: a dynamic digital library of premodern Chinese, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2019)
- Digital Approaches to Text Reuse in the Early Chinese Corpus, Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 2018, 5(2).