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Paper short abstract

This new digital scholarly edition builds on past philological and editorial work, manipulating technologies such as xml annotations and html multidimensionality to encourage multivalent and dynamic readings of Zeami’s Fūshikaden and introduce his ideas to a wider audience of scholars and learners.

Paper long abstract

The shift from print to digital media is incomplete: Zeami’s formerly secret writings (hidensho) are not yet available digitally in any rigorously produced digital scholarly edition akin to those for European writers, meaning they are not represented in the digital canon of intellectual history. This paper introduces the ongoing construction of a digital scholarly edition of Zeami’s writings, beginning with Fūshikaden.

Other scholarly editions of Fūshikaden by Omote Akira in Zeami, Zenchiku (Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 24) or the more recent Fūshikaden kenkyū by Shigeta Michi, like all paper editions, produce a two-dimensional representation of the text. While paper editions inevitably identify one text witness as authoritative, a digital edition has the flexibility to allow users to select which manuscript to focus on. Paper editions are limited by the characters available for publishing, but a digital edition can include variant characters, even hentaigana using Unicode and freely available fonts, which supports non-specialists and learners in reading the handwriting of the originals. Finally, by including multiple versions and commentary from throughout transmission history, readers can familiarize themselves with the dynamism and variety of interpretations and evaluations of Zeami’s ideas. The aim of this digital scholarly edition is thus to foster a multiplicity of perspectives on Zeami’s Fūshikaden.

This shift to digital is in some ways analogous to the previous shift from manuscript to print. While it makes the texts available for search engines and generative AI (LLM), its strength lies in offering human readers the opportunity to explore the textual heritage. Although algorithms’ ability to suggest important information is improving, the results of such extremely distant reading is often reductive rather than productive. Guided by the philological and editorial work of print editions, beginning with Yoshida Tōgo’s first publication in 1908, this online digital scholarly edition of Zeami's texts reintroduces the rigor of scholarship by enriching the digital texts with annotations following guidelines set by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), allowing for more systematic searches. Leveraging the multi dimensionality and interactivity of html websites, this digital scholarly edition will facilitate human engagement with and new analytical approaches to Zeami’s theoretical writings.