Digital data and historical studies: an introduction to the data platform of the Anti-Japanese War and modern Sino-Japanese relations

ABSTRACT Built by the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Data Platform of the Anti-Japanese War and Modern Sino-Japanese Relations is an integrative platform that upholds the ideals of public interest and sharing. Since its online trial use in the second half of 2017, this data platform has added about four hundred late Qing and Republican era newspapers, more than eight hundred periodicals from those periods, and more than eight thousand books. It also contains over eight million pages of scanned and catalogued images. Compared with other large databases related to modern Chinese history, this data platform has clear advantages: it has more data and is easier to use. It is an attempt to build a research-oriented integrated database in the age of big data.