An Investigation of the Digitization of Chinese Genealogical Records
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Kuo, Hsiu-Ping
Abstract
Genealogy plays an important role in historical studies. There is a vast amount of Chinese genealogical books, spanning over 500 years and over the entire China proper. The content of a genealogy book usually includes family documents, family tree, kinship, the profiles of the clansmen, ethical norm of family and editing information. These records are influential material for the study of family history, demography, economics, local society, and so on. Computer science can work as a powerful tool for studying genealogical records if we can digitalize and store genealogical data in an efficient way. The idea of digitizing genealogy is not new, but the concept and format are still evolving. The purpose of this study is to investigate an approach and a format to record the information of existing genealogical books, so as to provide an environment for users to transfer the data on Chinese genealogical books into a portable and extendable format; thus enhance the effective use of Chinese genealogical data and provide a way for genealogy researchers to observe and ask questions. The format we propose in this thesis is called JiaPu Markup Language (JPML). Notable genealogical structures such as GEDCOM and China Biographical Database (CBDB) have also been examined and adopted to improve the scalability of JPML. We have also designed interfaces for users to create and edit genealogical records to record the information, especially the lineage and kinship relations between people, from existing genealogical books. All data in our system can be exported into Excel or JPML format.
Subjects
Genealogy
digitalization
XML
Digital Humanities
Type
thesis
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