Extending thematic analysis to facilitate the understanding of chinese ancient books

In China, and after almost half a century of rapid economic development, the country's leadership attention has now been redirected to the creation of a much needed "cultural confidence", which has created general sense of urgency in cultural heritage preservation and dissemination. There are an estimated 27.5 million volumes of Chinese ancient books (CAB) kept in the records of the Chinese Libraries that describe different eras and aspects of Chinese ancient civilization, reflecting their political, religious, intellectual, economic, social, and ethical backgrounds. However, bringing these books to the public awareness is not easy due to linguistic, historical and social complexity of the content. Having identified VR books as a potential technological solution to respond to these barriers, problems emerged in preparation for the technical implementation linked to narrative story lines and identification of complex elements of text requiring illustration and linking back to the storyline. To address these problems, the research adopted a thematic analysis approach. However, because of the complex nature of CABs, the deep rooted implicit knowledge that is embodied in the CAB content and the difficult specific terminology that often refers to artefacts that are not in use anymore (i.e. social events, hierarchies long forgotten and historical or representative characters that are unknown nowadays), the first stage of thematic analysis (familiarizing yourself with the data) is particularly difficult. This paper illustrates how the research team addressed the entire process through the use of two separate and consecutive thematic analysis processes: 1) to understand the narrative storyline; 2) to identify key themes. The first analysis extended the familiarization with data stage by adding the following sub-stages: 1) manuscript filtering; 2) overcoming language barriers; 3) understanding the manuscript content; 3) understanding in detail the fragmented and incomplete historical and biographical storyline; 4) understanding the period social context. The second thematic analysis followed a priori coding thematic analysis aiming at identifying the themes and categories of themes requiring illustration and connecting with the narrative storyline. This combination of the two thematic analyses allowed the team to produce the necessary tools for VR implementation, namely: An historical/ biographical narrative and an ontology of illustrative themes.