Digital heritage portal interfaces are generally similar to digital library and search engine interfaces in displaying search results as a list of brief metadata records. The knowledge organization and search result display of these systems are item-centric, with little support for identifying relationships between items. This paper proposes a knowledge graph system and visualization interface as a promising solution for digital heritage systems to support users in browsing related items, understanding the relationships between items, and synthesizing a narrative on an issue. The paper discusses design issues for the knowledge graph, graph database, and graph visualization, and offers recommendations based on the authors’ experience in developing three knowledge graph systems for archive and digital humanities resources: the Zubir Said personal archive collection at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore; Singapore Pioneers social network; and Polyglot Medicine knowledge graph of Asian traditional and herbal medicine. Lessons learned from a small user study are incorporated in the discussion.

This article is a critique of the neologism “Daoist medicine” (daojiao yixue 道教醫學) that has recently entered scholarly discourse in China. It provides evidence that this expression is an anachronism which found its way into scholarly discourse in 1995 and has now become so widely used that it is seen as representing an undisputed “historical fact.” It demonstrates that the term has no precursor in the pre-modern record, and critiques two substantive attempts to set up “Daoist medicine” as an analytical term. It reviews earlier scholarship on Daoism and medicine, or healing, within the larger context of religion and medicine, and shows how attention has shifted, particularly in relation to the notion of overlap or intersection of these historical fields of study. It proposes that earlier frameworks grounded in epistemology or simple social identity do not effectively represent the complexity of these therapies. Practice theory, on the other hand, provides a useful analytic for unpacking the organisation and transmission of curing knowledge. Such an approach foregrounds the processes and dynamics of assemblage, rather than theoretical abstractions. The article concludes by proposing a focus on the Daoing of medicine, that is, the variety of processes by which therapies come to be known as Daoist, rather than imposing an anachronistic concept like Daoist medicine.

This article studies the Taiqing jinye shendan jing 太清金液神丹經 (Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold, hereafter Scripture of Liquid Gold), attributed to Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343 CE), to examine the intersection of religion, science and medicine in China. Passages from the Scripture of Liquid Gold describe the healing powers of drugs and highlight ways medieval writers imagined the transmission of medical knowledge, as well as the specific places producing potent substances. The text provides a view that contravenes standard narratives of foreign medical migration that vector into China via Buddhist channels. As such, we argue that it provides a novel view of medical migration in its time period. As one of the early sources on physical geography and trade goods from Southeast Asia, it is an important resource for early knowledge of the region and is one of the earliest examples of possible Daoist religio-technical continuities between the regions.

"Asian Medicine and COVID-19: Ethnologies, Histories, Reflections" published on 13 Aug 2021 by Brill.