Text project

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone,

 

As I mentioned previously I have been collecting and sorting a fairly extensive

amount of information from the internet consisting primarily of Chinese medicine

texts from premodern eras. The current sorted material consists of 423 texts in

Unicode format, I have around 120 more that have not been sorted, and a couple

of websites that have not been thoroughly combed for novel material, I think

potentially there are another 100-150 texts easily available from known

resources.

 

Obviously nobody is going to read all of this stuff, but there are searching

options in Wenlin which make it possible to search the entire pool of files in

about thirty seconds. This outputs a report which will auomatically links you to

the texts where the phrase appears. I've been doing some writing lately and

found this a delightful feature.

 

While it is nice to be able to read the classics, another aspect of this

information is the family medical records and the posthumous papers of eminent

physicians which are also available. I've found the experiences I've had with

family trained herbalists to be very interesting as their models for practice

can be at once very simple and very subtle. All of that is just to say that

there is more than another raggy copy of Shennongbencao here, it's very

interesting, and sometimes not very hard to read material.

 

I'm not sure if this was posted to everybody, but there a a variety of links to

free applications for learning Chinese. While in my opinion these are not as

flexible as Wenlin, they are adequate for navigating and searching individual

texts and, being free, the price is right. If you look

at:http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html you'll find one application, and at

the bottom there are links to a number of other free or low cost Chinese

learning software programs that will function as viewers for the text files and

allow for searching and mouse pointer word lookups.

 

The texts have been forwarded to David Botton's website (which Attilio mentioned

a while ago) where he will be posting them, though I'm not sure in what format

as of yet.

 

About twenty people emailed me as of Monday AM and I have sent zip files off to

them containing the sorted material, I have had several inquires since and once

everybody who wants the stuff has written in I'll mail them again (each mailing

hangs up my computer for a while due to antivirus checking so I'd rather do bulk

mailings). A couple of people had rejected the email because of the size. If

your mailbox will not accept 10meg attachments send me an email at

parufus and I will give you a gmail account, which seems to have no

problems with large attachments. I believe I alerted the people who's email

rejected the messages, if you have not received the emails let me know and I

will put you in the second mailing.

 

If anybody would like to assist me there are a number of chores which would be

very helpful:

 

-Looking through and determining the nature of the unsorted material (this

requires a working knowledge of Chinese and some sort of word processor that

will allow you to open and display Unicode files).

 

-Downloading and formatting material that is novel from a couple of websites. (I

have a Word file containing a collated list of file names from various sites

color coded so it is easy to pick out what is the same and what is different).

 

-Providing any bibliographical information that might put a work in context.

There is a bibliographical search engine from Taiwan that seems adequate for

this kind of work)

 

-Providing English language titles for various texts.

 

As always, take care, and thank you for your enthusiasm.

 

Par Scott