Text Analysis on Collected Exegesis of Recipes
Data Analytics Practice Opportunity 2021/22
About the Collection
“Collected Exegesis of Recipes”《醫方集解》is a series of Chinese medicine rare books written by Wang Ang (汪昂) in 1682. The book has included over 800 Chinese medicine recipes corresponding to different diseases. It has contributed greatly to the development of modern Chinese medicine. In addition, it has summarized the recipes invented by other Chinese medicine practitioners in the past and presented them in a simple and straightforward way. The content is well organized and explained. Therefore, the series is of high practical value and popular among Chinese medicine practitioners during the period.
The book contains more than 230,000 Chinese characters and is divided into 21 chapters according to the use of the recipes. Within the chapter, numerous recipes are recorded along with the symptoms of their targeted diseases, the usage reminders, and the effects of the recipes. Occasionally, one recipe could be presented in two variances, each serving similar but different purposes.
Motivation
The main motivation of the project is to promote the usage of Chinese medicine. After short surveying with the people surrounding us, we found that many people do not have a deep understanding of Chinese medicine. Therefore, we would like to extract the data from the text and analyze them, followed by producing some interesting statistics about the usage of ingredients among different recipes. With these, readers, including ourselves, can acquire more knowledge about Chinese medicine.
On the other hand, we were also excited to represent this Chinese classic in a modern, technological style. By combining the current technology with the traditional Chinese readings, the readers can easily learn the content of the book without spending long hours of reading, which will be a better fit for the modern era. Therefore, it helps our readers gain more exposure to Chinese classical texts.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures (ASCDC) in providing part of the OCR texts of Collected Exegesis of Recipes and the Chinese medicine ingredients dataset for reference in this project.
Project Team
This project is conducted by a group of students in the Data Analytics Practice Opportunity 2021/22:
- Steve Yu Shing CHENG (CSE/2)
- Nick Ka Tung WU (CSE/2)
- Juno Chun Ngo YAU (MBChB/3)