Exploring Maritime History through Digital Humanities: The Southeast Asian Maritime Travelogues Corpus (SEA-MTC)

Maritime history encompasses a diverse range of primary data sources essential for digital humanities research. Although there are several digital libraries and repositories for maritime historical materials, the availability of open-access digital humanities platforms focused on travelogues remains limited. Southeast Asian Maritime Travelogues Corpus (SEA-MTC) platform has been proposed to create an open digital humanities platform specifically focused on Southeast Asian maritime travelogues. It will incorporate a full-text search function and various other digital humanities tools. This paper outlines the current plan and future developments for the SEA-MTC platform, which includes the utilization of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) processes for text and entity extraction, along with other relevant tools and functionalities.