Creating, Linking, Visualizing and Interpreting Chinese and Korean datasets with MARKUS Environment

MARKUS (https://dh.chinese-empires.eu/markus/) is a multi-faceted research platform which allows researchers to automatically detect and manually correct personal names, place names, time references, official titles, and any other user-supplied named entities and to export the results with links to integrated databases and toolkits for further analysis. It has been developed by modelling humanities research flows and allows researchers to switch between annotation, reading, exploration, analysis, and interpretation. MARKUS has been a pioneer role in non-European language digital scholarship. The Korean version (K-MARKUS) is the first systematic attempt to adapt the model to another language.

This presentation will focus on how MARKUS has been used by researchers and students in Chinese and Korean Studies. HU Jing and Brent will also discuss the model used to develop MARKUS into a multilingual platform. In the first part, HU Jing will introduce the main functionality of MARKUS, including primary source text discovery and import from textual databases, the automated and manual mark-up of default named entities and user-generated tags, keyword discovery, batch mark-up, linked Chinese, Korean, and Manchu reference materials, data curation, content filtering, data export, as well as the associated textual analysis and data visualization platforms linked with MARKUS. In the second part, Brent will share his expertise in the construction of the K-MARKUS platform. He will introduce the mechanism of MARKUS, and show how MARKUS is able to be extended into other languages facilely by bringing in the example of K-MARKUS. Lastly, HU Jing will demonstrate a pilot study on a set of Korean records Yŏnhaengnok (Chosŏn Travelogues to Beijing) by using MARKUS and K-MARKUS in combination to show how the multilingual dimension of MARKUS benefits transnational studies.