Vol 26 | No 2 | Spring 18
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Collaborative Digital Humanities Project Led by UCI Libraries

ImageIn 2016, the UCI Libraries successfully competed for a $53,810 grant from the Mellon Foundation - Council of East Asian Libraries Innovation Program under the leadership of Dr. Ying Zhang (Research Librarian for Asian Studies). The grant supports a digital humanities project titled "From Curation of Collection to Creation of Knowledge: Building a Bilingual Dictionary of Ming Government Official Titles through Expert Crowd-Translation."

This is a highly collaborative project among four diverse groups of people- (1) four Chinese studies librarians from UCI, UC Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard, (2) four Ming expert consultants from Princeton, West Point (United States Military Academy) and Beijing Administrative College, (3) Ming scholars around the world and (4) several information technologists at UCI Libraries and in the San Francisco Bay Area..

The project produced two open access products. The first is an online platform, of which the source codes have been made available for access at no cost and can be repurposed for compiling dictionaries of any subject domain. The online platform served as a virtual community where over 40 Ming scholars worked together to translate Ming government official titles. The quality of the bilingual dictionary is triple secured through functions embedded in the system that provide for credential authentication, peer-review and expert consultation.

The second and ultimate product is A Bilingual Dictionary of Ming Government Official Titles 明代職官中英辭典, of which the first edition has been uploaded to eScholarship for open access. Within two months of release, the online dictionary received 3,737 hits and was downloaded 724 times. Feedback from scholars is overwhelming - "It is very impressive." The librarian team welcomes corrections and suggestions from scholars, and plans to update the content as needed.

For more information please contact Dr. Ying Zhang, the project lead and Research Librarian for Asian Studies, at yingz@uci.edu.