Exploring the Classification of Traditional Chinese Bibliographies through Interactive Visualization

Traditional Chinese bibliographies can be regarded as the earliest forms of knowledge organization system in China, which embed rich academic value and can reflect the knowledge, cultural, and political status at that time. This study adopts the digital humanities approach to investigate the bibliographies in a data-driven manner. We select seven representative traditional Chinese bibliographies and produced structured data by semiautomated methods. Interactive visualization is used as the main technique to provide both quantitative and qualitative view for humanities scholars to discover patterns, trends and anomalies in the change of the classification schemes of the traditional bibliographies. Examples are given to manifest how this interactive visualization can act as a tool to facilitate humanities research and provoke scholars thinking. We discuss the potential of the visualization technique to be used for studying traditional Chinese bibliographies and the embedded sociocultural implications.