Heidelberg Research ArchitectureDigital Output

This database focuses on a special type of newspaper known as the xiaobao or entertainment newspaper. For this first phase of construction, the database mainly focuses on the xiaobao that specialized on courtesan entertainment, actors and theatre, movie stars in motion pictures, and literary productions. It covers the time period from 1890s to the 1930s.

The database has been created to facilitate research on the project's instrument and object of investigation: the commercial periodical press, a new medium that dominated the contemporary print market and became one of the prime sites for the dissemination of knowledge and the production of culture in early twentieth century China. In particular, our focus is on four seminal women's or gendered journals-a key genre of the new media-published between 1904 and 1937. They include Nüzi shijie (Women's World, 1904-07), Funü shibao (The Women's Eastern Times, 1911-17), Funü zazhi (The Ladies' Journal, 1915-31), and Linglong (Elegance, 1931-37).

ECPO joins together several important digital collections of the early Chinese press and makes them available open access. It provides full runs of publications including advertising inserts and illustrations, and a detailed publishing history. For a number of periodicals the project added descriptions on item level: article, image, and advertisement. Each item's content is analyzed by keywords. The project also offers a cross-database agent and data API's for data re-use.

GECCA (Group Exhibitions of Contemporary Chinese Art) was created by Franziska Koch in connection with her doctoral project on Western group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art. It includes around 300 exhibition entries covering the period from 1982 to 2009. The GECCA mapped includes only group exhibitions that presented at least three mainland Chinese artists and were hosted by major public and non-profit institutions (such as communal and/or state funded museums, important privately/corporately funded art institutions and cultural centres).

This website presents an introduction to the efforts of the League of Nations to investigate in the Sino-Japanese conflict about Manchuria. Our starting point is a Japanese silent propaganda film from the early 1930s about the work of the so-called Lytton Commission of the League of Nations, which visualises events of international politics for a global public. The website combines the use of the Omeka platform with the Video Annotation platform Pan.do/ra.

The Hachiman Digital Handscrolls Project (HDH) is a pilot study to enhance digital presentations of movable image-and-text formats. The open source system HyperImage is the pivotal tool employed to realize the aims of the project. HDH offers an innovative access to seven digitized Japanese illuminated hand scrolls ranging from the 14th to the 19th century.

A HyperImage representation of Kailāsanātha Sukula's historical map Kāśīdarpaṇa (1876). It is a relaunch of the basic HTML website www.benares.uni-hd.de published in 2001 by the Vārāṇasī Research Project of the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. The existing data was converted to the Unicode standard (utf-8) and is presented as HyperImage application.

SARIT provides electronic editions of texts in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. These are documented, dated and have embedded notes about their change history using TEI XML. A data set was published on heiDATA, the latest versions can be found on the website.

The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art contains more than 4.200 illustrations from the late 19th and the 20th century.  It is one of the finest collections of ephemera like old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters in India. In a collaborative endeavor between Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture and the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe the collection was digitized and annotated by local and international experts. The whole collection was published as open access image pool in 2016 within heidICON - The object and multimedia database of Heidelberg University.

The Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) is an Historical and Comparative Encyclopaedia of Chinese Conceptual Schemes. TLS is designed as as a collaborative forum for discussion on the close reading of Chinese texts. It provides a corpus of classical Chinese texts wherever possible with interlinear translations and links the texts incorporated with an analytic dictionary of the Chinese language. It pays special attention to historical keywords. TLS works towards a cross-cultural study of conceptual history. It compiles a detailed synonym dictionary of Chinese and systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic hierarchies of synonym groups. TLS develops a system of syntactic categories for the analysis of Chinese texts, a system of rhetorical devices for the analysis of Chinese texts, and deploys a system of standard semantic relations, aiming to define the Chinese conceptual space as a relational space. TLS seeks to make available up-to-date databases on historical phonology and the history of Chinese characters

The Turkologischer Anzeiger/Turkology Annual (TA) is an indispensable systematic bibliography for Turkology and Ottoman Studies. The data was produced at the Cluster of Excellence between 2009 and 2011. The project digitized the first 26 published volumes at the local MediaLab and produced quality OCR full text using the Abbyy FineReader software. Team members from the Department of Computational Linguistics then analysed and parsed the data into a database. With the end of the project, maintenance of the database became difficult and had to be stopped eventually. Because of the personal engagement of Dustin Heckmann, one of the former project members, not only the data was secured, but also the parsing itself significantly improved.
To sustain data and provide users online access the data was transferred to FID Nahost-, Nordafrika- und Islamstudien.

The Video Annotation Database is powered by Pan.do/ra, an open source platform which can manage large collections of video and can collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations. Multiple users can link scenes to other resources or relate a single scene with outside materials, such as a publication. It provides a basic descriptive set of metadata with keywords and a video transcription layer, as well as a geo-localisation tool to relate single scenes to areas on a map.

The project is a multi-layered multimedia presentation that locates transcultural connections and flows between various Sufi shrines or Islamic pilgrimage centres in India by plotting documented images, videos, audios and objects onto maps, thereby making linkages between different regions. The author, Yousuf Saeed, wrote a short introduction on the Tasveer Ghar platform.

The Project Wissenschaftssprache Chinesisch / Modern Chinese Scientific Terminologies aims to understand the distribution and transformation of Euro-American knowledge in late imperial China (ca. 1600–1911) through the reconstruction of Chinese terminologies coined, altered, disputed and successively refined since the early nineteenth century. The project has limited its scope to the disciplines of philosophy, logic, physics, chemistry, geography (i.e. "knowledge on foreign countries"), politics and international law. In addition, it concentrates on the formative period of modern Chinese scientific vocabulary between ca. 1840 and 1930.

Ziziphus is a digital still image metadata editor developed by the HRA. It is based on the VRA core 4 XML schema, a “data standard for the description of works of visual culture as well as the images that document them.” A key feature of VRA core is the distinction between works of art ("works") and their visual representation ("images"), which may be organised in collections. Ziziphus is among the first open source implementations of a VRA editor. Its user-friendly interface offers XForms (Ziziphus1) or web-components (Ziziphus 2) based editing of metadata, which means that users are not confronted with raw XML.