Creating a Digital Edition of Mongolian Historical Documents

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a digital edition of the Altan Tobchi, a Mongolian historical manuscript written in traditional Mongolian script. The Text Encoding Initiative guidelines were adopted to encode the named entities, commentaries, transcriptions, and interpretations of ancient Mongolian words. Named entities such as personal names and place names were extracted from digitized text by employing Support Vector Machine. A web prototype was developed for digital humanities scholarship for utilizing digital representations of ancient Mongolian historical manuscripts as scholarly tools. The proposed prototype is able to display and search TEI encoded traditional Mongolian text and its transliteration in Latin letters along with the named entities' highlights and the scanned images of the source manuscript.