明淸婦女著作
明淸婦女著作

數據庫描述

The purpose of the Ming Qing Women's Writings project is to offer researchers and students digital information on collections of women's writings held in the project's participating libraries. These collections were mainly published during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties; some were published in the Republican period (1911-1949). The database will continue to be updated and expanded. It is an effective and powerful research tool for those interested in Chinese literature, culture, and history, and especially for students of women's literature. It can be searched using many access points, including name of author, title of collection, poetic form, region, etc., both in Chinese and Pinyin (see Search page). The full records contain much rigorously verified data. Individual collections can be viewed online in their entirety by using the page turner.

Research tools include:

  • Browse indexes of Collections by library, Collections by publication year, and Collections by collection type.
  • Browse indexes of Personal Names, Gender, Ethnic Groups, Marital Status, Geographical Locations, and Biographies.
  • Browse indexes of Poem Titles, Poetic Forms, Tune Patterns, Remarks on Poetry, Prose Genres, and Tanci.
  • A table for Chinese chronology covering 16 dynasties with a total of 580 reign titles for 3045 years (up to 1911).
  • A table of the sexagenary cycle which covers 2681 years (up to 1911).

Information in the database can be accessed through the Search page by the following 4 methods:

  1. Browse indices - Personal Names, Gender, Ethnic Groups, Marital Status, Geographical Locations, Biographies, Poem Titles, Poetic Forms, Tune Patterns, Remarks on Poetry, Prose Genres, Tanci, Books by date, Books by type, Books by library, Reign Titles, and Sexagenary Cycles.
  2. Select a book.
  3. Keyword search.
  4. Compound search.

There are 23 points of access to the database in both Chinese characters and Pinyin (in keyword and compound search); this provides in theory approximately 1.68 million search permutations.

Search features include:

  • Search poets/authors by year (e.g. 1644).
  • Search poets/authors by time period (e.g. 1600-1700).
  • Search poets/authors by reign title (e.g. Qianlong).
  • Search poets/authors by geographical location (e.g. Hangzhou).
  • All poets/authors are linked to poems and collections.

Contextual information:

  • Includes information on more than 8000 related family members and friends.
  • Provides links between poets based on exchange of poems.
  • Indicates primary sources such as bibliographical catalogues related to poets.
  • Indicates persons contributing comments, prefaces and colophons for or about poets.

Technical Description

The Ming Qing Women's Writings project uses a variety of technologies, including databases, xml, xslt, and scripting languages.

The digital objects which contain the page images are stored in XML, using a subset of the METS schema. XSLT is used to deliver these images through our web-based page-turning device.

The Unicode UTF-8 encoding scheme has been used throughout.