Consideration of a text encoding initiative markup for ancient Chinese characters present on Chinese excavated materials

Abstract

　Various Chinese excavated materials that have been rediscovered recently act as crucial contemporary materials for the study of ancient China; therefore, there is an urgent need to interpret this ancient Chinese characters’ information and digitize it to broaden the scope of research. Thus, this study aimed to organize the interpreted information from the “Baoshan Chujian (包山楚簡),” one of the excavated materials, into Excel data as a text database. We examined the text encoding initiative markup based on the “Dataset of Ancient Characters on Chinese Excavated Materials.” However, other concerns such as handling “Gaiji (外字)” characters and dealing with binding errors need to be addressed in future studies.