CENSUS: General Catalog of Dongba Manuscripts

Querying the CENSUS manuscripts database

This is an how-to page, which I developed to show step-by-step how the CENSUS Information Retrival System works with keywords research; please also refers to the readme page.

The core of such retrieval system I developed in Php, with some functions which operate in NLP treatment of the query for ampliation of research power of the query itself as tokenization, erasing of stopwrds and basic stemming.

Determination of occurences, frequency of keywords and weight of document retrieved is also implemented for building a page-rank output of the retrieved documents.

My work of CENSUS retrieval system is developed grounding on previous experience I tested on "Bibliografiapiste" alias "Western Desert Caravans' Routes" Egyptologic bibliography (my MA degree in Egyptology, April of 2004) where and whence I was passionated with Digital Humanities applications and I started to study Information Retrieval Systems, lighted by Pr. Zampolli and Dr. Lenci lessions of Computational Linguistic; about this session focused on free keyword research, many thanks to professor Paolo Ferragina.

Structural scheme of MySql database with commented fileds is available here as a pdf.

Free keywords resources: query CENSUS manuscripts archive.

Restrict Your research to one collection


Click on browsed icons of manuscripts retrieved to open in a new tab detailed analysis of selected pictograph, with explanation of pictograph and its attestation (if available). browse the readme page.