Welcome to the Wesleyan Confucian Etext Project

Introduction and Goals

As I understand it, research in the field of Greek Classics was revolutionizeda decade or so ago when the entire classical Greek corpus became availableon CD-Rom. Suddenly projects that would have consumed weeks or months oftedious work could be accomplished in minutes or hours. Speed was no guaranteeof quality, of course, but there seems little doubt that the ability toconduct computerized searches of important texts was a great boon to thefield.

Chinese studies is poised on the verge of a similar revolution. A fewclassical-era philosophical texts have been available for one or two years,but progress in putting more texts on-line has been slow. With recent improvementsin Chinese optical character recognition (OCR) technology, though, and withthe possibility of many people working together over the Internet, the timefor rapid movement towards digitizing the Chinese philosophical and literarycorpus has arrived.

We hope to contribute to this progress primarilyby producing Etexts.

• We will focus on Confucian and Confucian-inspired texts from the 11th century C.E. to the present. There are, to our current knowledge, no texts from this period currently available. We will also make available some classical-era Confucian texts that others have prepared.
• We will key our etexts to standard, scholarly editions, thus facilitating use of these resources by the scholarly community.
• Plans are in progress to add at least rudimentary SGML tags to our texts and to implement a sophisticated search engine.
• We will endeavor to be as accurate as possible, but we will also bear in mind the novel nature of electronic texts distributed over the Internet: neither set in stone nor printed on paper, they are readily corrected as soon as errors are reported. We thus encourage anyone using one of our texts to let us know as soon as they discover any typos, no matter how trivial.

If electronic resources are going to be prepared and made available ina decentralized fashion by people around the world, some coordination willbe necessary. We would be happy to share information with anyone interestedon subjects like:

• How does one scan and recognize Chinese texts?
• What texts should be priorities?
• What work has already been done, and where is it available?
• What is in progress or being planned by others?
• What funding sources are there?

Texts

Ultimately, it's the texts that matter, of course; and we've got texts for you, both those we've prepared ourselves and relevant ones originally entered by others. They can all be accessed at the Wesleyan Chinese Philosophical Text Archive. Enjoy!

		Date created: 10/19/96
Last modified: 6/10/97
Copyright © 1996, Stephen C. Angle
Questions? Contact: Stephen C. Angle