DISCOVERING RELATIONSHIPS FROM IMPERIAL COURT DOCUMENTS OF QING CHINA

The Qing Imperial Court documents are a major source of primary research material for studying the Qing era China since they provide the most direct and first-hand details of how national affairs were handled. However, the way Qing archived these documents has made it cumbersome to collect documents covering the same event and rebuild their original contexts. In this paper, we describe some information technology that we have developed to discover two important and useful relations among these documents. The first is the citation relation among the Imperial Edicts and the Memorials. We discovered 6,801 pairs from the 37,831 Taiwan-related Imperial Court documents in the Taiwan History Digital Library (THDL) and produced 1,101 graphs of successive citations, which we call IE-M diagrams. The second relation is a template relation, which indicates groups of documents that were created following a specific format. Numerical data can also be tabulated from these documents and be used for further analysis. Our studies show how information technology can be used to discover useful contexts from seemingly unrelated historical documents.