Past Awards

The Ming History English Translation Project (MHETP) is a collaborative project that makes available translations from Chinese to English of portions of the 明史 Mingshi, or the Official History of the Ming Dynasty. Compiled from materials collected over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644) and thereafter, it contains valuable information on Ming government, society, and prominent individuals and is one of the most important sources for the study of Ming history. GHF funding will support website hosting and other technology fees.

This project will build an open-access public platform, based on Large Language Models and Private Knowledge Bases, with which scholars can explore the collected writings of 325 individuals from the late Yuan to the early Qing found in the Siku quanshu. The user interface will allow researchers and the interested public to investigate topics in Ming history and culture. They will be able to call up documents and have them punctuated, analyzed, and translated, and they will be able to discover who else spoke to those topics.

The China Biographical Database project (CBDB) has opened the beta version of its crowdsourcing platform to a project for identifying Ming dynasty social associations, which is currently devoted to Ming dynasty letters. The GHF award supported the hiring of graduate students in China in Ming literature and history to review the more than 4,000 existing identifications writers of Ming dynasty letters and to add new ones.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported the development of the University of Irvine Libraries’ crowd-translation system for Ming government official titles. A critical reference tool for scholars of the Ming dynasty in China, this online reference uses an Application Programming Interface (API) to synchronize crowd-sourced translations. It includes 3,245 entries arranged in tiers related to the hierarchy of government offices. Each lists the official title in traditional Chinese, followed by its pinyin, English translation, and alternative title names (including abbreviations, colloquial names, and commonly-known names).

This project digitized and enhanced a Ming scroll depicting a street in Nanjing during the Lantern Festival marking the end of Lunar New Year. Users zoom in to examine details that were unrecognizable prior to digital enhancement, and click on hotspots to learn more information.