Will the computer break into Dream of the Red Chamber?
That's not science fiction; it's the title of a lecture given by a professor of Chinese literature at the Chinese Culture University recently.
The eye-opening title in fact refers to a major revolution looming for research work in Chinese history and literature: a revolution in which the computer is playing a leading role.
Chinese historical and literary records are vast and voluminous. Searching through catalogs for titles, looking through books word for word, and making notes and extracts by traditional research methods is a laborious and painstaking process. Many years must be spent before writing a thesis on preparatory work alone; this, plus the continual increase in new information and materials, has been a problem of great concern to researchers in history and literature.
In view of this problem, Dr. Mao Han-kuang of Academia Sinica three years ago proposed a plan for the academy's Institute of History and Philology and its Computing Center to "computerize historical records," enabling computers to manipulate historical information so as to facilitate research.
Work on the plan, supported by a grant from the Council for Cultural Planning and Development, got under way in July 1984 and is expected to take six years to complete. The ultimate goal is to store the complete text of China's 25 traditional dynastic histories, around 60 million Chinese characters, onto one thin computer disk, enabling researchers to search, index, and analyze the material by software commands.
The first year's task was to enter into the computer the monographs on "food and commodities" (economics) from the first eight histories, including the "balanced standard" chapter from the Shih chi, or Records of the Grand Historian. As this material was fed in, proper names, place names, official positions, book titles, special terms, dynastic dates, chapter headings, and summaries were marked with special signs so that the computer could create separate index files for each category and perform searches.
For example, to find out the different duties performed during different historical periods by the official known as a shang-shu, all one has to do is to type in the two characters for shang-shu with the sign for "official title" and the computer will search the proper file and list each occurrence of the term together with the number of the volume, page, and paragraph in which it is found. Searching the 150,000 characters of the "food and commodities" chapters from the first eight histories takes the computer a little over a minute, and it leaves no omissions.
The next year's task was to enter the "food and commodities" chapters from the remaining histories, along with the entire Shih chi and Han shu, or History of the Han. Seeing how laborious the job of entering and marking the text at the same time was proving for his staff, Hsieh Ch'ing-chun, the Computing Center's director, discovered a way to simplify their work by letting them type in the text straight through without marking it word by word and having the computer do the sorting and classifying for them.
Last year, the system made another advance: Users can now make notes and comments on the information listed from a search and transfer it onto a disk of their own if they wish to preserve it for future reference.
Computerization of historical records is an inevitable trend. As Hsieh points out, "a computer won't get tired, it's fast, and it has a low rate of error—advantages in manipulating vast amounts of historical information which the human brain can't match. At the same time, information stored in a computer can be made available to other institutions, accelerating the interflow of knowledge."
Hsieh says that his computer main frame currently can be accessed by 28 people simultaneously. All users need to do is apply to Academic Sinica for a code number, and they can hook their Chinese-language computer into the academy's by telephone using a modem.
The importance of the work extends beyond the ivory tower. Huang K'o-tung, professor at Ming Chuan Women's College of Commerce who has attended many seminars on computerization overseas, takes the history of the Japanese war, of which Japan, the Chinese Communists, and Taiwan each have their own versions, as an example. When the day comes when information is processed entirely by computer, whosever historical records are computerized first and in the most detail will be accepted first. The emergence of historical truth will be controlled by the country with the most advanced computerization.
"If we don't pick up the pace, there may come a day when later Chinese generations learn about their own history only through the English or Japanese they see on a computer screen," he says earnestly. "That would be sad indeed!" Academia Sinica's plan to "computerize historical records" may seem to be merely another exercise in computer application, but the meaning behind it is worth pondering.
[Picture Caption]
"Look something up for me, will you?" The computer age has arrived. (cartoon by Chu Teh-yung)
This five-man work group at Academia Sinica is designing software to "computerize" historical records.
China's 25 dynastic histories can be stored on one disk.
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