The Secret History of the Mongols (SHM) is the earliest Mongolian written primary source. Scholarship dated it to the thirteenth century CE. The SHM reveals critical insights into the Mongolian culture, historiography, and language, making it the subject of extensive academic research in several languages (e.g., Mongolian, English, Chinese, French, Russian). The increasingly large volume of academic literature analysing various aspects of the SHM makes it increasingly difficult for scholars to access all academic literature written worldwide. This research aims to combine historical methods and computational techniques to make the SHM machine-processable and, thus, machine-understandable. The parsing of the critical edition by Paul Pelliot (1949) and the English translation by Igor de Rachewiltz (2006) into an online content management system feeds an application on the Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) platform. This application allows users to access the source via the EHM tools for content search and visualisation. Each SHM’s section/story is tagged with metadata on EHM, including geographical, temporal, and story type information. This application allows the users to visualise historical information using infographics, retrieve online relevant resources automatically and in real-time, and get sentiment-analysis insights yielding concept parsing, emotion recognition, intensity ranking, and aspect extraction results. The SHM is linked to other primary sources on EHM through the Chronicles and Travel Accounts of Afro-Eurasia application. This new EHM application for the SHM showcases how computational history can manage and present research online with powerful ICT techniques and philological rigour.
Secret History of the Mongols, Digital History, Engineering Historical Memory