ENP-China Webinar: “Beyond Digital Archives: The Making of the Shareholder Register Database (1930-1937)” 

Beyond Digital Archives: The Making of the Shareholder Register Database (1930-1937)

A talk by Sun Huei-min 孫慧敏, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei

24 February – 9:30 am (Online seminar: Zoom link)

This talk will introduce the contents of the Republican Shareholder Register Database (1930-1937), our preliminary findings and the problems we encountered. The raw data of the database come from the Archives of the Ministry of Industry (Shiyebu, 實業部), a collection of the Archives of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. The digital images of this collection have been free accessed online for decades, but it remains difficult for researchers to retrieve and analyze the information. The Republican Shareholder Register Database (1930-1937) project launched in 2017 aimed to make the information searchable, countable and analyzable. Moreover, the database is well-connected with existed digital resources developed by the IMH so the researchers can excavate related information easily. Nonetheless, how to check and correct existed errors efficiently, how to negotiate the differences between archiving and data processing, how to develop useful analytical functions, and how to make the researchers’ searches and judgments accumulative, all of them are waiting for us to think, imagine and solve.