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- Convenors:
-
Yuta Hashimoto
(National Museum of Japanese History)
Sakiko Kawabe (National Museum of Japanese History)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Transdisciplinary: Digital Humanities
- Location:
- Lokaal 2.22
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel will discuss the current status and challenges in digitizing endangered cultural resources in Japan, including tangible materials such as documents and artifacts, as well as intangible materials such as dialects and performing arts.
Long Abstract:
This panel will discuss the current status and challenges in digitizing endangered cultural resources in Japan. There are a vast number of historical and cultural materials preserved in Japan, including tangible materials such as documents and artifacts, as well as intangible materials such as dialects and performing arts. It is estimated, for example, that at least two billion pre-modern documents are preserved across the nation. However, only a small portion of these are held in museums and archives, and many are at risk of being damaged, scattered, or lost. Thus, digitizing these endangered cultural resources is a pressing matter for the future of Japanese studies. During this panel, scholars who have worked on digitizing various types of cultural resources in Japan will share their experiences and challenges.
Two main points will be discussed during the panel. The first is the digital technologies and platforms required for preserving and utilizing these endangered cultural resources. The rise of Digital Humanities has enabled the use of international standards such as IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for digitizing cultural resources in highly reusable and machine-readable formats. While open-source platforms such as Omeka make it easy for non-developers to publish digitized cultural resources online, some panelists developed their own crowdsourcing platform to digitize large volumes of historical documents.
The second topic is public engagement. Engaging with the general public is often crucial for digitizing and interpreting endangered cultural resources. Cultural resources such as local dialects and cultural artifacts are often utilized by citizens. The number of resources, such as historical documents, is so massive that it is impossible for a small group of scholars, librarians, and archivists alone to digitize and preserve them. Therefore, the panelists have been engaging with the general public in various ways for their digitization projects.
We hope this panel will provide a chance to share different perspectives on cultural resource preservation. We also believe that our efforts on digitization can be discussed in terms of digital history and public history.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Sakiko Kawabe (National Museum of Japanese History) Shunsuke Yamashita Masaharu Hayashi (National Institute of Informatics) Hiroshi Horii (AMANE.LLC) Ayumi Ogawa Yoshihiro Takata (Kanazawa University) Shiho Sasaki Yenling Cho (Hokkaido University) Keisuke Nakamura
Paper short abstract:
This paper will introduce a project by the Academic Repository Network (Re*poN) to create a crowdsourcing system accompanied by hybrid events and discuss how digitization and crowdsourcing can help local museums collect and interpret information on their collections of everyday objects.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will discuss how digitization and crowdsourcing can help local museums collect and interpret information on their collections of everyday objects. Throughout Japan, everyday objects have been collected and preserved as materials with which we can learn the history and culture of the regions. However, many local museums are poor in detailed records of these objects in their catalogs; for example, some objects lack essential information on how and for what they were used or who made, used, and donated them and when. Such undescribed collections cannot be utilized in museum exhibitions or other educational or scholarly activities but just be abandoned.
To solve this problem, the Academic Repository Network (Re*poN) started a project to create a crowdsourcing system to gather information on everyday objects in cooperation with Shibetsu City Museum in Hokkaido. In early October 2022, we held a first hybrid meeting in the city, aiming to know how effectively we can collect information on these objects when informants gather from inside and outside the region in person and virtually. The offline participants were local museum staff, researchers (from the fields of informatics, museology, or ethnography), and local senior citizens who may know about these old everyday objects, while museum professionals and researchers from outside the city also joined online. In the meeting, we take a look at undescribed everyday objects from the museum collections one by one. At the same time, participants discussed and recorded on google forms what these objects are and when, where, and how these objects were made and used, sharing any related information from their own experience, the internet, or any other sources.
Through the meeting, we learned the effectiveness of combining online and offline to interact with various informants from inside and outside the region to collect information on everyday objects. The digitization of collections realized communication beyond the region and made undescribed collections recognizable as cultural resources. We will develop an online crowdsourcing system with hybrid meetings to expand the community to collect and share information on local everyday objects.
Yuta Hashimoto (National Museum of Japanese History)
Paper short abstract:
The paper describes Minna de Honkoku, a crowdsourcing platform for transcribing large volumes of historical documents with a built-in AI kuzushiji recognition function.
Paper long abstract:
Before the 19th century, the majority of documents published or written in Japan were written in kuzushiji, a cursive script that is no longer used in publications and is therefore difficult for modern readers to decipher. To access the knowledge contained in these historical documents, it is often necessary to transcribe a large number of kuzushiji documents in an efficient manner. However, the number of people with the ability to decipher kuzushiji is said to have fallen below 10,000.
Recently, advances in deep learning technology have made it possible for AI to automatically recognize kuzushiji characters. AI-based mobile applications, such as miwo (http://codh.rois.ac.jp/miwo/index.html.en), which automatically recognize kuzushiji characters, are now available. However, the accuracy of these AI programs is still far from perfect, resulting in many recognition errors. A more realistic approach to large-scale kuzushiji transcription is to combine human and machine intelligence.
Minna de Honkoku (https://honkoku.org/index_en.html) is a crowdsourcing platform for transcribing large volumes of historical Japanese documents. It has a built-in AI kuzushiji recognition function to support the transcription efforts of its participants. Since its release in 2019, the platform has completed the transcription of over 1,500 documents, totaling over 20 million characters.
This paper discusses two aspects of Minna de Honkoku. The first is its technical aspect as a Digital Humanities project, including the adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to facilitate collaboration with multiple digital archives, as well as its integration with more powerful AI through its collaboration with the miwo app.
The second aspect is Minna de Honkoku's engagement with the general public as a public history project. We have promoted our project through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as through a live broadcast program on Nico Nico Douga. As a result, the platform has attracted 2,000 volunteers as participants.
So Miyagawa (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL))
Paper short abstract:
The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) has been conducting projects to preserve endangered languages in Japan. We explore their histories and examine two ongoing projects that adopt global standard formats in digital humanities, such as TEI, IIIF, and Dublin Core.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation focuses on the preservation of endangered languages in Japan. Japan is home to several indigenous languages, including Ainu (Ainuic language family), Amami, Kunigami, Okinawan, Miyakoan, Yaeyaman, Yonaguni, Hachijo, and various Japanese dialects (Japonic). The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) manages the documentation and preservation of these languages.
There are five projects currently ongoing: NINJAL Digital Archive (NINDA), Open Multilingual Online Lexicon of Okinawan (OMOLO), Endangered Languages in Japan Database, Kotoba no Museum Portal, and Corpus of Japanese Dialects (COJADs). This presentation starts by exploring the history of these projects before examining the two projects that adopt global standard formats in digital humanities (DH).
NINDA, the digital archive of language resources from NINJAL, features images of rare documents, audio, and videos related to endangered languages and dialects in Japan. All the metadata is in Dublin Core, the de facto standard of metadata description in DH. Furthermore, all the images accompanying the documents, audio, and videos are provided through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and displayed in IIIF viewers, such as the Universal Viewer and Mirador. Users can easily interoperate and reuse the items provided through the IIIF. Users can also easily zoom in and out of images and annotate them with a low burden on the local computer’s memory. This archive is built upon Omeka S, a content management system developed for digital archives that readily enables Dublin Core metadata descriptions and IIIF installation.
OMOLO is an online dictionary of Okinawan that utilizes TEI Lex-0, a dictionary-oriented subset of TEI, the de facto standard of text markup in DH. This is based on NINJAL’s publication of the dictionary in paper format, which we have now digitized. We annotated all the TEI Lex-0 meanings with English, Portuguese, and Spanish translations for the Okinawan diaspora community. We publish the TEI data publicly on an open license; thus, users can freely utilize it. We are also visualizing the data on a user-friendly website.
Thus, this presentation proposes two specific models to digitize resources related to the preservation of endangered languages in Japan utilizing the standard formats in DH.