The Institute of Linguistics, and the Institute of History and Philology opened an exhibition on October 15, entitled Language in Space and Time. The exhibition celebrates the achievements and successful entry into a second phase of the Language Archive Project, an extensive digital archiving project that has been carried out cooperatively by the two Institutes since 2001.

In the past, linguistic records were preserved in written form on materials such as shells and bones, bronze, bamboo, stone, paper, silk, and so on. Nowadays, digitization methods can be used to reproduce and annotate these records, and multimedia methods can be used to record and further analyze oral language.

The Language in Space and Time exhibition features five sub-projects of the Language Archive Project that are divided into two main themes: Taiwan indigenous languages and Han languages. Through an information search system created especially for this exhibition, the similarities and differences among 36 lexical items (vocabulary items) common to each language are explored.

The ongoing Language Archive Project currently includes the Pre-Qin Oracle Bone, Bronze, Bamboo and Wood Inscriptions Language Materials Archive, the Old Chinese Tagged Corpus Project, the Min and Hakka Language Archives Project, A Socio-phonetic Study of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin Project, and the Formosan Language Archive Project.

The exhibition is held on the 2nd Floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Academia Sinica until March 31, 2010, every Monday to Friday 9:00am to 17:00 pm.

Related website: http://digiarch.sinica.edu.tw/exhibition.jsp