Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica

In 1984, the Institute of History and Philology (IHP) collaborated with the Institute of Information Science (IIS) to launch the “Automatic Classics” project. This project was initiated by Dr. Hsieh Ching-chun with the IIS and supported by Dr. Ting Pang-hsin, the then IHP Director. Dr. Mao Han-kuang with the IHP chaired the program, along with the participation of many IHP colleagues. In the first decade of the project, the Twenty-Five Histories and 39 titles comprising a total of 48 million characters were digitized. In 1993, this database was renamed Scripta Sinica. In the following year, the institute launched the “Scripta Sinica Project” to house and digitize literatures of significant value to the studies of Chinese humanity and history. In 1995, the “Scripta Sinica Working Group” was set up. In 2008, the Group was restructured as “Scripta Sinica Research Group.”

Over the years, this database has undergone numerous updates. In 1995, the on-line version of the full-text, searchable Scripta Sinica was launched. In 2006, its updated version, the “Scripta Sinica Beta 3.0” was launched. In 2008, the current version of Scripta Sinica was launched and open to be subscribed by foreign institutions. In the following year, this database became a free service to domestic group and individual subscribers. In addition to increase its digital contents, Scripta Sinica keeps developing new features to its search system, such as “image-text cross reference,” “appositional term analysis,” “textual comparison,” “proper name tagging” and others. As of the end of 2019, the Scripta Sinica had already housed more than 1,000 titles, comprising more than 700 million characters, and became an important tool of digital humanity.