Abstract

During the last decade or so, thanks to the advent of Digital Humanities, new opportunities have arisen to analyze documents. Accordingly, this project seeks to develop eLearning pedagogy via constructing an innovative, expandable online platform that supplies interactive teaching and learning activities.

Directly connected to the World History curriculum, and operating exclusively in English, the proposed platform will present learners with a substantial body of scanned primary sources together with text analysis tools. Four basic objectives are thus sought: to cultivate learners' generic English ability; to support students to decipher (in English, with a translation device) documents written in numerous European and Asian languages; to enrich critical thinking and critical reading skills; and to mine large cultural data sets in order to deepen comprehension of Asia's past interaction with the West.

In emboldening knowledge development - facts and skills - World History students, as part of their formal course assessments, will for the first time language process, topic model, and information extract. This trans-media, trans-historical approach to knowledge-enlargement not only permits the examination of historical documents as literary and cultural objects, but allows students prospect too to ask and answer new analytical questions, significantly from various standpoints, about life during Asia's past.