An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for East Asian Studies Reviewed by The Digital Orientalist Members

Since its founding in 2013, The Digital Orientalist has grown from a research blog by Cornelis van Lit to an online magazine with a continuously evolving team of +20 scholars and researchers from all backgrounds and levels. This has allowed the DO to cover more topics, and review more digital resources. When I find a database online that I am not familiar with, one of the first things I do is search the name of the database followed by “digital orientalist” to see if someone has reviewed it. Thus, as a matter of convenience, I have put together this piece listing all the reviews of databases and tools useful for anyone working in the field of Sinology, or related to it. 

I focus primarily on reviews of databases and tools with the idea of offering a list of tools to aid research tasks; but it’s worth mentioning that the DO has many more pieces on individuals’ research and cataloguing processes involving Chinese and East Asian languages that are worth a read! The DO website has a very useful “topics” section that allows users to select keywords to browse all the entries, and the editors have been publishing digests overviewing the newest publications from their respective teams. 

There are two major benefits from doing this listing. One is to see what has been reviewed, and what has not. Don’t see a database you’ve been working on? Do a review, and submit it to the DO! Many readers will be silently, deeply grateful. The second one is to see what is no longer active (such as, sadly, the very useful Full-text database of Warring States manuscripts 戰國竹簡全文資料庫, which was taken down at the end of 2024), or what has changed over time. It also identifies potential gaps that scholars in the DH could fill in the future!

The listing below is organized chronologically, from oldest pieces/reviews to newest. 

Working with images: 

1.  North China Railway Archive (華北交通アーカイブ) is an online database of digitized stock photographs illustrating life under Japanese occupation in interwar North China, reviewed by Daigengna Duoer, 2020
2. LabelIMG and YOLOv8: reviewed by Lu Wang, 2024 

Working with textual sources: 

1. List of resources to find freely accessible digitized texts, by James Morris, 2019 
2. SmartHanzi and DDB Access: two dictionaries with segmentation capabilities, reviewed by James Morris, 2020
3. The Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA), a repository of digitized Chinese Buddhist texts, reviewed by Matthew Hayes, 2020 
4. Chinese Converter, to transliterate Chinese, by James Morris, 2020
5. The Online Dictionaries and Full-text Search of Mongolian Languages and Written Manchu The Online Dictionaries and Full-text Search of Mongolian Languages and Written Manchu モンゴル諸語と満洲語の資料検索システム, an online database of digitalized dictionaries and texts for Inner and East Asian languages, reviewed by Daigengna Duoer, 2020
6. The Center of Bamboo Silk Manuscripts (BSM) database to search ancient Chinese manuscripts, reviewed by Maddalena Poli, 2020 
7. OpenRefine, to polish a text into structured data and clean messy data, reviewed by Lu Wang, 2020, with a follow-up in 2021 here and another one in 2022 here 
8. HUMANUM 漢語多功能字庫, and Open Ancient Chinese Characters Glyphs Database 開放古文字字形庫, online dictionaries of Chinese updated with the discoveries from evidence from unearthed documents, reviewed here by Maddalena Poli, 2021
9. SegmentAnt: reviewed by Mariana Zorkina, 2021
10. Voyant Tools, a tutorial to use it with Chinese language, by Lu Wang, 2021 
11. Shuge 書格 , an online database with sections on digitized texts reviewed by Maddalena Poli, 2022 and sections on visual materials reviewed by Bryce Heatherly, 2022
12. Databases on Dunhuang manuscripts, reviewed by Maddalena Poli, 2022
13. The Yinxu Oracle Bone Inscription Digital Database 殷墟甲骨文數據庫, reviewed by Henry Jacobs, 2022
14. Guyin xiaojiing 古音小鏡, reviewed by Maddalena Poli, 2023
15.  MARKUS, a NPL platform designed for classical Chinese language, reviewed by  Lu Wang, 2023
16. Digital Archive of Bronze Images and Inscriptions 殷周金文暨青銅器資料庫, reviewed by Henry Jacobs, 2023
17. Shang Zhou Bronzeware GIS 殷周青銅器地理資訊系統, reviewed by Henry Jacobs, 2023
18. Database of Medieval Chinese Texts, reviewed by Laurent Van Cutsem, 2023
19. The China Biographical Database (CBDB), reviewed by Henry Jacobs, 2024
20. Wu yu dian 吾与点, a platform to run specific NLP tasks specific to and tailored to Classical Chinese on texts in the language, reviewed by Gian Rominger, 2024
21.  Jingyuan Digital Platform 镜原甲骨数字平台, reviewed by Peichao Qin, 2024
22. The Index of Tangut Literature database, reviewed by Enfu Zhang, 2024
23. A review on using Python to prepare a Chinese text for computational analysis, by Mariaka Zorkina and Tilman Schalmey, 2024

Mapping tools: 

1. Sinorelics 华夏古迹图, a Chinese-language online platform for collecting and sharing data about cultural heritage sites, reviewed by Bryce Heatherly, 2021