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1. Introduction
Traditionally, humanists are used to studying paper-based texts for their research tasks. In recent years, a lot of research institutions, such as libraries and digital humanities research centers, digitize history files and text data by using information technology to establish digital archives databases and develop digital tools to support digital humanities research so that the humanities research environment and knowledge acquisition appear great changes. The emerging research on digital humanities (DH) in past years helps digital humanists, through the assistance of full-text digital data and digital tools, observe the phenomena which are not easily observed by interpreting traditional paper-based texts (Schreibman et al., 2008). DH that includes the systematic use of digital contents and tools in the humanities disciplines and makes possible new kinds of research is work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities disciplines (Drucker, 2013). Namely, digital humanities research involves the analysis, comprehension, production, and sharing of a huge amount of digital sources with the support of digital tools. Digital humanists in the digital humanities field heavily relied on using information technologies, such as text mining (Widlöcher et al., 2015), annotation (Chen and Tsay, 2017; Sato et al., 2016), social networks analysis (Jackson, 2017; Uboldi et al., 2013), geographic information system (GIS) (Kallaher and Gamble, 2017), and natural language processing (NLP) (Brooke et al., 2015) to analyze data from digital sources to extract useful information and generate new knowledge. Many previous studies (Chen et al., 2019; Luczak-Roesch et al., 2018; Uboldi et al., 2013) have proved that applying digital tools could help digital humanists solve research problems more efficiently than performing manually. For example, Chen et al. (2019) developed an automatic text annotation system (ATAS) that can collect resources from different databases through Linked Data (LD) for automatically annotating Chinese ancient texts to support digital humanities research. It allows the digital humanists to refer to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for digital humanists interpreting Chinese ancient text through digital reading. The experimental results reveal that the ATAS has higher reading effectiveness than the MARKUS semi-automatic text annotation system. Luczak-Roesch et al. (2018) presented a novel tool that...