The construction of semantic markup for Biographies of Eminent Monks is part of a project on digital documents conducted at Dharma Drum Buddhist College between 2008 and 2010 with support from the Haoran Foundation. The achievement contributes to the field of digital humanities and electronic librarianship in several ways. To our knowledge, so far this construction has been the largest classical Chinese corpus with structural and semantic markup in TEI. The four biographical collections respectively from the Liang, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasty contain more than 1, 300 biographies of the most famous figures in Chinese Buddhist history. By applying semantic markup to the task of distinguishing and referencing all personal and place names as well as all dates in these texts, it is possible to present the texts in a much more user-friendly format. In this paper, we describe an approach to interface design based on semantic markup and inspired by GIS technology that maps the contents of the biographies in geographic space. The semantic markup allows us to search the dataset in ways that go far beyond available indexes. It is for the first time now possible to search e.g. for events at a certain period in a certain area. Another innovation is the concept of nexus point which describes basic events in the form ”One or more person (s) at a certain time in a certain place.” With these nexus points expressed in markup, we can display events in Chinese Buddhist history on a map and reference these visualizations directly back into the texts themselves.
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