A Key to Unlocking Digital Humanities Research — “EdUHK-NTU Digital Humanities Workshop: Corpus Tools and Text Analysis”

To promote the use of digital tools in linguistic and language studies, an online workshop entitled “EdUHK-NTU Digital Humanities Workshop: Corpus Tools and Text Analysis” was held on 18 February 2022. The workshop was co-hosted by the Centre for Research on Linguistics and Language Studies (CRLLS), Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies (LML) and National Taiwan University (NTU). More than 200 participants attended, including postgraduate & undergraduate students, academic teaching staff and the public who show a keen interest in digital humanities.

The workshop was conducted by four speakers from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Dr Chueh Ho-chia from the Department of Bio-Industry Communication and Development at NTU introduced CORPRO to the participants, which is a Chinese text-mining tool for humanities, and the functions within the corpus that users can use to conduct text analysis, comparison, and frequency count on a certain word, such as a character’s name from a piece of literature like A Dream of Red Mansions (紅樓夢). Dr Chyu Shih-wen from the Department of Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan Normal University presented the use of CORPRO in the preparation of teaching materials for her courses. Dr Andy Chin (LML) presented the construction and application of “The Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese”, such as how to search within the corpus and conduct word analysis based on spoken data adapted from black and white Cantonese movies. Users are able to find useful demographic information on a word. Dr Lau Chaak Ming (LML) presented the construction of a Cantonese segmentation tool relevant to natural language processing. The Cantonese segmentation can be difficult due to its lack of whitespaces to separate a word like English.   

The workshop concluded with a roundtable discussion among the scholars on their perceptions regarding the theme. It is encouraging that the workshop gathered a large number of interested participants. We foresee the arrangement of similar workshops or seminars in the near future promoting cross collaboration with different units working in the field of digital humanities and disseminating new ideas.     

Professor Cheung Hin Tat (CRLLS/LML) and Professor Chen Kuang-hua from NTU chaired the workshop. Dr Andy Chin and Dr Lau Chaak Ming were the speakers.

Dr Andy Chin presented the construction and application of his “Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese” (https://hkcc.eduhk.hk/)