Sinological Indexes in the Computer Age: The ICS Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series

48 China Review International: Vol. ?, No. ?, Spring 1994 Sinological Indexes in the ComputerAge: The ICS Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series copyright1994 by University of Hawai'i Press In 1929 Ye Shaojun organized his family members to cut and paste the materials needed for the Shisanjingsuoyin (published in 1934). A friend who watched their work activities jested that this was actually "a home handicraft business." Twenty years later, a million IBM punched cards of eighty columns each might have been shuffled around to index an important Chinese text, but in the past decade, concordance making in China has entered the computer age. Since 1984 computerized databases have been created for the dynastic histories, Tang poetry and prose, Hong lou meng, Taiwan gazetteers, and many other major texts. In Hong Kong, under senior editors Professor D. C. Lau and Dr. F. C. Chen, the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has, since 1988, been developing a database of all extant Chinese writings, excluding archaeological finds, from the pre-Qin period to a.d. 589, the end of the Northern and Southern dynasties. The first use of this database has been in the making of concordances . In 1992, the Institute began publication of the ICS Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series of some ninety-three planned volumes covering all 103 extant Chinese writings from antiquity to the end of the Eastern Han in a.d. 220. The ICS Series commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute and the ninety-fifth anniversary ofthe publisher, the Commercial Press. A complete list of titles and publishing schedules is given at the end of this review. The ICS group see their project as a continuation of the indexing and concordance work begun by the Harvard-Yenching Institute in the 1930s and interrupted by World War II. Publication is proceeding in two stages, with priority given to works for which no concordances exist. In the second stage, ICS will publish newly edited and corrected editions of concordances published elsewhere in earlier years. In every instance both the newly generated texts and the "redone" concordances are rigorously proofread, "a minimum of seven times." The most demanding aspects of this project have been the collation of the ancient texts (many are fragmentary) and the creation ofthose rare or obsolete Chinese characters, almost four thousand, not found in existing computer writing programs, which are prepared mainly for business use. Although generally adopting the Sibu beiyao editions, ICS has tried to select the earliest available editions of texts, rather than those "surreptitiously edited" Features 49 by later scholars, especially ofthe Ming and Qing dynasties. The collators have also extensively consulted "parallel passages" in ancient texts. An "anthology of parallel passages in ancient writings" might be compiled from this database. Each ICS concordance includes the complete text of the original work, with added punctuation and footnotes on textual variants and editorial emendations. The concordance itself indexes only single characters, romanized in pinyin and arranged in alphabetical order. Variant readings are cross-referenced. Characters may be located either by romanization (there is a Wade-Giles-pinyin conversion table) or by character stroke count. The number of occurrences of a given character is indicated at the first entry and then followed by a listing, in order of their appearance in the text, ofall phrases and sentences where the character occurs. Characters are located in the text by section, page, and line number. A table at the back provides a total character count for a given work and the single character ("vocabulary") count, and lists each character in the order of frequency from highest to lowest. The Liji zhuzi suoyin (Concordance to the Liji) was among the twelve titles in the first batch of concordances published by ICS in 1992. The Liji yinde (Index to the Liji), no. 27 in the Harvard-Yenching Sinological Series, was indeed not a concordance, as are some of the HY Series "indexes," but an index of"nouns, important verbs and adjectives" in the Liji. The HY Index-was not published with an accompanying Liji text. Both the ICS Concordance and the HY Index follow the Song dynasty edition reprinted in Ruan Ji's Shisanjing zhushu...