Paper short abstract:

This paper presents ongoing collaborative research on a 17th century Japanese album of calligraphy samples and excerpts (tekagami-jō) held at Yale University and raises issues related to digital commentary and preservation of pre-modern texts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents ongoing collaborative research on a 17th century Japanese album of calligraphy samples and excerpts (tekagami-jō) held at Yale University and raises issues related to digital commentary and preservation of pre-modern texts. The tekagami-jō at Yale University contains 139 samples of calligraphy attributed to famous hands. Beginning with an excerpt attributed to the hand of Emperor Shōmu and containing pieces attributed to a number of emperors, courtiers, and poets, the album adheres to the expectations of what can be called a calligraphy album genre. As such, it also serves as a compilation of excerpts of famous literature including excerpts from Buddhist sutras, individual Chinese and Japanese poems, and short sections of classical poetry anthologies.

With high-resolution images of every page of this album uploaded to a IIIF image viewer and annotator (in this case Mirador), the "future" of the calligraphy, the literature, and the form of the album itself opens up in surprising ways. Images of once-whole works that now exist in disparate institutions can be brought together digitally and studied in a version of their previous form. The images and metadata that cohere to it may be used to develop OCR technology. Most importantly for this talk, this project (like similar ongoing projects in many institutions) provides ground for experimentation with collaborative research methods in the humanities and seems to represent new potential for preservation and aggregation of information. But the annotation-centered platform should also make us reflect on pre-modern commentarial traditions, which preserved the objects of commentary even as they also supplanted them (certain texts only survive in annotated "editions"). This paper thus proposes to juxtapose past and present methods of preserving and transmitting the past.