Digitization Projects "China to Digitize Folk Literature"

From the People’s Daily:

On July 13, 79-year-old Yang Liangcai and several colleagues carefully selected several yellowed books and documents from huge piles of cardboard boxes in a document room of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.

“These paper originals will be sorted, scanned and then made available online,” Yang said.

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The books and documents selected are just a small part of the valuable folk literature works that Chinese scholars and researchers have collected in the more than 60 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The vast majority of the collection has never been published. Some were letterpress printed, some were mimeographed, and a few are handwritten.

The collection includes nearly 5,200 types of books and documents, with a total of over 840 million words, and covers all folk literary genres, such as the myth, legend, narrative, joke, fable, fairytale, ballad, proverb and epic. Thanks to the efforts of several generations of scholars and researchers, these folk literary works will soon be made available online and can be accessed publicly.

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