by Shih-Pei Chen
"Bursary Award, Digital Humanities Conference 2009"
In this paper we present a full-text digital library of Taiwanese land deeds. Land deeds were the only proof of land... more
In this paper we present a full-text digital library of Taiwanese land deeds. Land deeds were the only proof of land activities such as transaction of ownership and leasing in Taiwan before 1900. They form a major part of the primary documents at the grassroot level in pre-1900 Taiwan, and are extremely valuable for studying the evolution of the Taiwanese society.
Land deeds, on the other hand, are difficult to study because they are hand-written and hard to read. Furthermore, they are scattered in many different locations and, in some cases, in the hands of families and private collectors.
In order to make the land deeds more accessible to researchers and educators, the Council for Cultural Affairs of Taiwan embarked on a major effort to organize available land deeds and typed them as machine readable full-text. Based on this collection and collections from other sources, the National Taiwan University built a full-text digital library of Taiwanese land deeds. The current size of the collection is over 23,000 which, according to one estimation, cover about 50% of all existing land deeds. The collection will be expanded to around 30,000 by the end of the year.
Our digital library is built with the goal of providing an electronic research environment for historians to conduct research using land deeds. Thus in addition to providing full-text search and retrieval, we developed a concept of regarding the query return as a sub-collection and built tools to help the user find meaning and relationships at the collection level. Post-processing presentation, term frequency analysis and co-occurrence, and relation graphs are some of the tools described in this paper. We believe that our digital library will bring Taiwanese historical research using land deeds to a different horizon.
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