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Two Trial Databases: The Database of Chinese Judicial Files (Jiangjin Part); Database of the Tokyo Trials Literature

2017-05-12

URL: http://www.datahistory.cn

Trial dates: 2017.5.12--2017.7.31

1.      The Database of Chinese Judicial Files (Jiangjin Part)

As a county of Chongqing province before 1949 and now a municipal district, Jiangjin is situated in the southeast of Chongqing, neighboring Ba county which has a large collection of archives in Qing Dynasty. Since 2012, Shanghai Jiaotong University Press (SJTUP), collaborated with the Department of History in College of Humanities of Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU), and the Archives of Jiangjin District (AJD), has endeavored to sort and digitalize the lawsuit archives during the period of Republic of China collected in the Archives of Jiangjin District. AJD now has more than 24,000 volumes of judicial files from 1911 to 1949, especially abundant in files during in the first 20 years of the 20th century.

According to their original preservation modes, these judicial files are sorted into 24 categories: marriage, business, debt, tenancy, boundary, property, theft, obstruction of the exercise of rights, family disturbance, obstruction of freedom, damage, other civil, other criminal, robbery, embezzlement, homicide, injury, corruption, violation of tax laws, forgery, false accusation, smoke/drug taking, fraud, and reference. The first phase of the Database contains 1,800 volumes (42,219 titles in volumes of 120,000 pages) mainly covering six categories of debt disputes, tenancy disputes, marriage, property, tax laws, property and business, with a wide time distribution from 1911 to 1949.

All archives in the Database can be retrieved by full-text search, multidimensional search or cross search. Moreover, statistics of items being retrieved and relevant literatures are provided in order to benefit the scholars making preliminary study of the archives.

2. Database of the Tokyo Trials Literature

Database of the Tokyo Trials Literature is the world's first full-text database of documents of the Tokyo Trials of Japanese war criminals in World War II. It is a collection of the existing literature of the Tokyo Trials acquired from around the world. The database includes transcripts of the proceedings and court exhibits of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, transcripts of interrogation of the International Prosecution Section as well as rare historical photos and relevant audio and video. All the materials have been classified, sorted, and indexed with Parallel Corpus technology, producing parallel versions in English, Chinese and Japanese as well as cross-referencing among texts, photos, audios and videos of the same subject. As a comprehensive and reliable source for researchers interested in the Tokyo Trials and related topics, the database brings together studies on the Tokyo Trials, serves as a platform for exhibiting and sharing researche.

Besides the National Archives of the US, documents pertaining to the Tokyo Trials are also stored in libraries and research institutions in the US, UK, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, India and Japan as well. In China, except documents covering the verdicts of the Tokyo Trials and unfinished personal notes written by a number of Chinese judges, no formal works on the Tokyo Trials have been published. With the support of the Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and its core expert team, we have acquired rare documents and resources from around the world, including copies and photographs of original texts and pictures purchased from the National Archives of the US.

The Database now contains about 60 million words, featuring 50,000-page or 50 million-word Transcripts of the Court Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East" (English), around 700 photos of court hearings, and videos of court hearings. All the database images and documents are preserved in high resolution after repair, scan, data inputting and data indexing. As the sole full-text searchable database about the Tokyo Trials, it allows multi-dimensional search and cross-referencing among the images, texts, audio and video materials and will have all documents available in English, Chinese and Japanese.