The University of Southampton

Hua Miao Archive

Date:
2000-2003
Theme:
Digital Libraries
Funding:
Self funded - no external funds requested

Songs and Stories and a Glossary of Phrases of the Hua Miao of South West China.

This electronic archive has been created from documents handwritten by the Hua Miao. The documents were given to the Parsons brothers who were born in South-West China in 1906 and returned there as Methodist Missionaries before and after the Second World War.

The archive consists of over 200 songs that record the early history, aspects of Miao social life and some "narratives", essentially folk stories. There is also a "Phrase Book" here called a Glossary.

The Parsons brothers, using a PC/AT and Wordstar, supplied electronic versions of the documents. The Project involved translating these Wordstar documents (containing many special characters to display the Hua Miao script) into a form suitable for a modern word processor (in the case Word97) and then creating the website using HTML and PDF.

The archive contains a concordance for the Songs and a look-up for words in the Glossary.

Using the special features developed in the Digital Libraries Group it is possible to look at the original hand-written documents.

All the original documents have now been encoded and can be seen in the archive. The project is complete.

Primary investigator

  • str

Secondary investigator

Associated research group

  • Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
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