In search for searchable Han texts of primary sources for pre-20th century Vietnam

Wed Apr 15 14:58:06 PDT 2015

Hello everybody,

I am writing my PhD dissertation on human perceptions of environment in Vietnam from 1450-1850 and, therefore, I am trying to find/build/contribute searchable Han texts of primary sources for studies of pre-20th century Vietnam.

Though I have learned about 2 follow things, I started to input text only in a "primitive" way (by typing texts) on a "primitive" platform (the Chinese WikiSource page).

1- There're people in Vietnam who accomplished a searchable text for the Dai Viet su ky toan thu (The Complete Book of Dai Viet). But such a searchable text has not yet been available to all people including myself. Part of the text (which covers the history from the beginning to some earlier years of the Hong Duc era or the 1470s) is made available by contributions of the Chinese WikiSource. (https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/大越史記全書) You can search with "大越史記全書."

2- "Chinese" people have developed a very good OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology and there's a very good community that promotes this technology to build searchable data for Chinese texts. Here: http://ctext.org/instructions/ocr. I find this platform friendly to use after doing a tiny bit with the OCR texts available here. But I have not had any idea how to bring this technology into the work of Han-Nom studies.

So it is my hope that if anyone is interested in this activity, please recommend if 1) there is a better platform to build this kind of data (rather than Chinese Wikipedia Source). I am having an idea to input some Han texts for the Phu bien tap luc, but, on the Wikisource tieng Viet page (maybe it is not a very good idea.)

2) when we work with Han texts, it would be great that we share the searchable texts (even a small passage) somewhere online so that other people do not need to type them again. I am aware that the idea is simple, but there will be a more complete data that emerges over time, while we are to wait for the development of OCR. N.B.: Many Vietnamese Han texts are manuscripts rather than print (like Chinese texts) - so there come more challenges to the OCR technology.

Kindly Regards,

Hieu Phung

Anh-Minh Do caligarn at gmail.com

Thu Apr 16 00:26:58 PDT 2015

Hi Phung,

This is an area that interests me very much. My father, James Do Ba Phuoc, who

was also a VSGer up until his passing earlier this year, was very focused

on the digitization of chu Nom.

My colleague Tomo and I are in the process of working with the national

library in Vietnam to further the work my father was doing in terms of OCR.

This is a project that the Nom Foundation is specifically quite keen on. We

are exploring the use of Google's Tesseract software to do so.

Please ping me more for further conversation. I'd love to chat.

Anh-Minh Do

Editor, Tech In Asia, Vietnam

Thompson, C. M. thompsonc2 at southernct.edu

Thu Apr 16 14:08:32 PDT 2015

Dear Anh-Minh,

I just wanted to say that although I did not know your father very well, I respected his work tremendously, I worked with him productively for several years on the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation and I am very sorry to hear that he has passed away.

My condolences to your family.

Sincere Regards

Michele

Michele Thompson

Professor of Southeast Asian History

Dept. of History

Southern Connecticut State Univ.

Dien Nguyen nguyendien519 at gmail.com

Thu Apr 16 17:11:01 PDT 2015

Dear Michele,

James Do passed away on 10 Jan 2015 in Saigon.

Diễn Đàn published the following obituaries and articles about his