Digital Sinologist is a project to bring the latest tools and technologies to the study of ancient China. We explored new ways of presenting critical editions and other scholarly texts online, new interfaces for creating and accessing scholarly data, and methods for expanding interdisciplinary cooperation.

We're scholars, but we're also web natives. So we wanted accurate, trustworthy information, but we wanted it to be instantly available, beautiful, and easy to use. So we identified key pain points in the research and publication of literary scholarship. And then we fixed them. We built an intuitive critical text editor, new formats for viewing scholarly apparatus online, and creative visualizations of historical and geographic data.

We built Critex, a Mac OS application for creating and editing critical editions with associated metadata. Critex presents an attractive and intuitive interface but also exports to standards-compliant archival formats and beautiful web pages.

We explored new ways of presenting scholarly information online. We built a prototype website that presented part of the Old English text The Life of Saint Edmund with glossary, textual notes, and scholarly commentary. As the reader scrolls down the page, the notes are automatically changed so that you always see only the notes pertaining to the visible text.

We built an interactive visualization of historical events with detailed timeline and map view. On the interactive site, you can find events from the life of the medieval Chinese poet Cao Zhi. They are placed chronologically on the timeline and geographically on a modern map. Readers can explore the events as well as detailed information about the historical geography of related places. The site is backed by a searchable database of historical place-names and citations of their use in Chinese classics and histories.