ctexts

ctexts is an open-source software project and data ecosystem designed to support the creation, curation, and analysis of Chinese texts, with a focus on classical and historical material. It combines a digitized repository, text-processing tools, and an application programming interface intended for researchers and educators. The project is community-driven, welcoming contributions from linguists, philologists, and software developers.

Core components include a text repository with metadata, an annotation framework, and tooling for normalization, segmentation, alignment, and linguistic analysis. Data formats are designed to interoperate with standard digital humanities workflows, including TEI-inspired XML and JSON representations. ctexts provides features for searching, cross-referencing, annotating, and exporting texts, as well as web-based reading interfaces and programmatic access through a REST API. Researchers can link texts with translations, glossaries, and commentaries, and can publish annotations for reuse.

The project emphasizes openness and reproducibility, with documentation, example datasets, and clear licensing for contributed materials. Usage scenarios span philological research, pedagogy, and digital humanities studies, enabling institutions to build digital libraries, curate corpora, and support linguistic analysis of large Chinese text collections. ctexts is related to other digital text initiatives and standards in the scholarly community, and often collaborates with libraries, universities, and cultural heritage organizations.

See also: digital humanities, text encoding initiatives, corpora, Chinese Text Project.