  We analyzed historical and literary documents in Chinese to gain insights
into research issues, and overview our studies which utilized four different
sources of text materials in this paper. We investigated the history of
concepts and transliterated words in China with the Database for the Study of
Modern China Thought and Literature, which contains historical documents about
China between 1830 and 1930. We also attempted to disambiguate names that were
shared by multiple government officers who served between 618 and 1912 and were
recorded in Chinese local gazetteers. To showcase the potentials and challenges
of computer-assisted analysis of Chinese literatures, we explored some
interesting yet non-trivial questions about two of the Four Great Classical
Novels of China: (1) Which monsters attempted to consume the Buddhist monk
Xuanzang in the Journey to the West (JTTW), which was published in the 16th
century, (2) Which was the most powerful monster in JTTW, and (3) Which major
role smiled the most in the Dream of the Red Chamber, which was published in
the 18th century. Similar approaches can be applied to the analysis and study
of modern documents, such as the newspaper articles published about the 228
incident that occurred in 1947 in Taiwan.
