While the name and emphasis of the project, as well as the practical ways to achieve its aims has been changed over the more than 30 years of its existence, a constant has been to allow access to accurate sources, but not insist on one single understanding or interpretation of these sources. Like on an archaeological excavation site, multiple of these layers might be in existence at the same time.
If there is a leading principle guiding us here, one might look to Morimoto Kakuzō 森本角蔵, who in 1921 published a concordance to the four Confucian classics. As the first of his usage notes, he wrote 理屈よりも便利を主としました — When in doubt, prefer convenience over principle.
The list in Main features has been on earlier iterations of a TLS websites and is reproduced here for your reference - all of these statements are still accurate, but they reflect the perspective of earlier stages of this project.
What we are trying to do here in these pages document the evolving project, which now can be characterized as an attempt to collaboratively and interactively explore the written cultural tradition of the East-Asian cultural hemisphere, as far as it is based on variations of pre-modern Chinese.
In an ideal world, this database would be compiled with the highest degree of confidence on each and every information item contained within,
Very broadly speaking, there are two main parts, that together make up the TLS:
- A corpus of texts
- Annotations to these texts
The text corpus
A list of available texts can be directly visited here, The TLS text list (on HXWD); there is also TLS Text list in this manual, which gives some background on the scope and organization of the list.
Generally speaking, texts have to be prepared in a very specific format to be available for annotation, however it is now not necessarily required to actually have the text stored in the database, but rather we are moving towards a confederated system of distributed text databases; see Search in the Kanseki Repository and Setting up a text repository for more information.
Annotations
There is a wide variety of annotation types available, additionally, some of these annotations are organized in taxonomic hierarchies. It is tempting to call this a dictionary, especially there is a lot of emphasis on linguistic annotation, but that would be misleading — it is more like citations as the raw material for a dictionary, since it lacks coherently edited entries that organize these citations according to editorial principles.
The following annotation types are available:
- Concepts
- Translations
- Word relations
- Rhetorical Devices and other observations.
- Citations: A composite annotation of Syntactil Word at a specific location in a text.