Overview of the Hanzi Normative Glyphs Dataset
This site is a repository called the Hanzi Normative Glyphs Dataset that makes available information card images, Hanzi character style clipped images, and metadata from the Ishizuka Register of Chinese Character Standards of Writing, the predecessor to the Hanzi Normative Glyphs Database (available from 2005 to 2015).
The Ishizuka Register of Chinese Character Standards of Writing was created by Harumichi Ishizuka, professor emeritus at Hokkaido University, as part of his Japanese language exercises, etc. while in office to demonstrate that standards for Hanzi glyphs existed for each era and region (country), and that those standards have changed. The Ishizuka Hanzi Glyphs Resources are organized in the form of information cards, and as of September 2005, is a group of resources covering 67 books including Chinese classics, Buddhist scriptures, and Japanese books, and is nearly 400,000 characters in total.
The digitization of the Ishizuka Hanzi Glyphs Resources began around 2000 by volunteers from Hokkaido University Graduate School, Division of Linguistic Sciences, to preserve the deteriorating information cards and to provide data to academia. Hanzi character style clipped images and metadata such as character type and number of examples were made available starting in 2005 as the Hanzi Normative Glyphs Database. This database provides one character style example from each resource (in case of multiple glyphs, one character style example per glyph), which led to many requests for all examples. Thus, in addition to the Hanzi character style clipped images and metadata made available by the Hanzi Normative Glyphs Database, the information card images are also available in the Hanzi Normative Glyphs Dataset as well.
Making a database available in an ongoing manner is very difficult. We believe that providing the dataset itself is an effective way to make the data available in a stable manner. That is why we chose to make the Ishizuka Hanzi Glyphs Resources available as a dataset to preserve it.
July 21, 2018
Preservation Society of Hanzi Normative Glyphs Dataset
