Research Abstract |
The aim of this research is to promote history study by providing an effective solution to the problems of Gaiji characters and variant characters, which has been a difficult issue for history researchers to construct a historical material retrieval system using the Internet. This research is meaningful in the following three ways : (1) Promotion of history study in such a way as providing a new interpretation or analysis of historical materials by analyzing the document structures of historical materials, and by constructing a cross-referential (integrated), Internet-based retrieval system for two or more related materials, (2) Providing of a concrete and an effective solution to a difficult issue in history study such as the input and output for Gaiji characters, (3) Contribution to the field of humanities as a computer-assisted history study system. For the whole of this retrieval system, a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program written in Perl is used. The old Ryukyu-kingdom Hyojosho (Council Court) documents concerning the visits of foreign ships are stored into DBMS (Open Text) in SGML(Standard Generalized Markup Language)-encoded data and retrievable by the application program that uses PAT50 and the pipe programs. In addition to the Ryukyu-related documents, three Japanese classic documents, Kojiki and Nihonshoki, were stored by "Original Japanese, " English Translations," and "Page Images of the Original Documents" respectively, and an English-Japanese full text coordinated retrieval system was constructed. These data are available on the web (http://www.okinawa.oiu.ac.jp).
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