The instruments phase: the library learns places and people
11 September 2026 · Nabu news
The last three phases moved fast — the German print library (the Deutsches Textarchiv, 5,478 volumes and 729,090 passages of German from 1473 onward), a Slavic deepening (Slovenian protestant prints, the Franček dictionary crosswalk, Old Church Slavonic additions), and a long-tail sweep that carried the shelf past Beowulf in facsimile and Hafez in Persian. The census stands at 2,274,289 documents / 106,877,441 passages across 156 sources and 167 language codes.
This phase gave the library something different: instruments — reference machinery that mints no texts of its own, but makes the texts already held answerable in new ways.
The library now knows where China is. The fourth gazetteer joins
Pleiades, Trismegistos and the cuneiform site index:
CHGIS/TGAZ (Harvard–Fudan,
CC0), 81,292 historical Chinese placenames from 221 BCE to 1911,
each carrying its hanzi name, pinyin transcription, valid years and
coordinates. nabu place chgis:hvd_167661 answers instantly — 大川,
a village-town, coordinates and all.
And the first text-mining lane ran over the Chinese canon. With a gazetteer in hand, the library scanned all 4.57 million passages of the Kanripo corpus — texts that carry no geographic metadata at all — for exact Han-character matches against those placenames: 3,771,151 candidate attestations across 10,055 distinct names, each recorded as evidence, never as fact. Precision rules do real work here (single characters never match, over-common words are stop-listed by measurement), and the candidates wait for human review before any document is actually marked as speaking of a place. The Yijing matching 大川 — “the great river” of the hexagram formulas — is exactly why the review step exists.
Persons arrive as an instrument too. The China Biographical Database (Harvard / Academia Sinica / Peking University; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, confirmed at first sync) — some 658,000 persons of Chinese history, 7th–19th century — is now held and checksum-verified: names, dates, offices, kinship, place associations. What surface it grows into (a person card? person references on documents?) is a decision the library will take deliberately, the way the places program grew from gazetteers.
The Arabic shelf learned its own intertextuality. From the
KITAB project’s text-reuse statistics
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), the library minted 931,943 reuse edges
between pairs of held OpenITI works — which books quote, excerpt and
rework which, with aligned-passage counts and chronology flags on
every edge. Asking nabu links on a held Arabic work now answers
with its textual relatives across eleven centuries.
And one small, satisfying surface: the dictionary card now says
when a word was first written down. nabu define bába --lang sl
ends the Pleteršnik entry with “first attested: Primož Trubar,
Katekizem, 1550” — the crosswalk between a 19th-century dictionary
and the 16th-century corpus it describes, rendered where you look
words up. Alongside it, four more sources joined the dated timeline,
and a batch of era-bound performance assumptions was re-measured
against the hundred-million-passage reality.
As always: everything runs on one machine, every number above is measured from the live catalog, and the licenses ride each record — the instruments’ non-commercial grants are enforced by the tooling, not by promise.