Friday, November 11

10:00 - 12:00   Session 1
12:00 - 1:00   Lunch
1:00 - 3:30   Session 2
4:00 - 5:00   Group Discussion/Roundtable
5:00 - 6:30   Reception

Saturday, November 12

9:30 - 11:30   Session 3
11:30 - 12:30   Lunch
12:30 - 2:30   Session 4
2:30 - 3:00   Wrap-up Discussion

Catherine Ryu, Michigan State University

Hyakunin Isshu (HI) as a Mini Database

The traditional format of the imperial anthologies of Japanese court poetry is conceptually akin to our notion of databases: they are curated collections of data whose basic unit is thirty-one syllable waka. This presentation explores the possibility of literally transforming Hyakunin isshu (a hundred poets, one poem each), compiled by Fujiwara Teika in the thirteenth century, into a mini database. HI is in essence already a “meta database” since Teika selected one hundred poets whose poems were already included in key imperial anthologies of waka. What I envision is a web-based interactive HI database expressly designed to handle queries guided by three research questions:

• To what extent can the basic linguistic grammar of classical Japanese be taught through waka?
• To what extent can the cultural grammar of classical Japanese be explicity taught through waka?
• To what extent can the linguistic and cultural grammars of classical Japanese be visualized for pattern recognition?

As such, once completed, this mini database will facilitate learners’ entry into the realm of classical Japanese via the 100 poems represented in HI.

Aliz Horvath, University of Chicago

On Structure and Style in the Dai Nihon shi

The Dai Nihon shi (The History of Great Japan), a major history writing project initiated byTokugawa Mitsukuni, contains an abundant but relatively under-researched collection of materials, providing insight into the characteristics and changes of Mito historiography during the Tokugawa and the majority of the Meiji period. Due to the substantial length of the source, the utilization of digital tools can significantly facilitate the process of dealing with the large amount of data, enabling us to trace the focus points of the compilers’ work in different time periods. However, this type of research methodology may have its limitations because it does not take into account the unique stylistic features of the text. Since I am at the initial stage of the research process, my presentation will focus on the fundamental questions of what digital tools may or may not tell us about the Dai Nihon shiand how we could potentially bridge the gap between content and form.

Paula Curtis, University of Michigan

On Late Medieval Forgery Production

The political and socioeconomic upheaval of Japan’s sixteenth century offered a fertile environment for ambitious groups and individuals to transcend social and geographic boundaries in pursuit of advantageous ventures. This presentation will introduce one such occasion, the formation of networks between low-ranking nobles in Kyoto, provincial warriors, and metal caster organizations, as they colluded (knowingly or unknowingly) to produce and disseminate forgeries of imperial documents and artisanal histories in exchange for goods and titles. I will consider means of cataloging the movement and relationships of people traversing the distance from Kyoto to the provinces and the mobility of the documents exchanged among them. By doing so in the context of digital humanistic research methods, I wish to explore the possibilities and limitations such techniques have for the analysis of medieval subjects, which are often plagued by issues of scarce or incomplete documentary evidence.

Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh

The Epigraphy of Business Documents

This presentation is part of a larger project that is concerned with the way in which writing mediates human relations, not only in terms of the semantic content of the text but in terms of its visual form. More specifically, it seeks to understand how the material aspect of writing mediated business networks in Japan from 1889 to 1940. To do so, it makes a digital analysis of more than ten-thousand letters in the archive of one of the largest Japanese companies of this period, the Mi’ike Mining Company. These documents were written with a panoply of instruments, from the brush to the pen to the typewriter, featured a variety of stamps, letterheads, and inks, and were duplicated using a range of reproduction technologies from the hectograph to the mimeograph, carbon paper, and printing press. Together, these technologies of inscription gave texture to this human network.

Amy Catalinac, New York University

On the Politics of Text

For most of the postwar period, politics in Japan revolved around individual Liberal Democratic Party politicians and their respective abilities –cultivated through personal campaign organizations and intra-party factions – to deliver pork to groups of voters in their electoral districts. Japan’s 1994 electoral reform changed all this.  Nowadays, politics looks much like it does in other parliamentary democracies: politicians contest elections as representatives of parties and promise policies their party will implement if it wins office. I apply cutting-edge unsupervised learning tools for quantitative text analysis to an original, digitized collection of 7,497 Japanese-language election manifestos produced by the universe of candidates competing in the eight House of Representatives elections between 1986 and 2009 to document when and how this profound shift occurred. Specifically, probabilistic topic models demonstrate that politicians’ electoral strategies shifted from pork to policy and scaling models show that parties became more ideologically cohesive after the reform.

Molly Des Jardin, University of Pennsylvania

On the Language of Empire in Taiyo Magazine (1895-1925)

How does the empire talk about itself? In imperial Japan, borders were in flux and a discourse of naichi (home islands) and gaichi (colonies) was established over time, making this question particularly compelling. Taiyō, a popular general-interest magazine, covers 1895-1925, and I have converted NINJAL's XML Taiyō corpus (tokenized by sentence) to word-tokenized UTF-8 text in order to discover what the publication might tell us about imperial language. I plan to begin with exploratory analysis using topic modeling as a starting point. One challenge of this corpus is its size: it consists of 1.2 GB of text and thus "breaks" nearly all available off-the-shelf tools when analyzed in its entirety (including Voyant Server and Topic Modeling Tool). Due to this, I want to think about productive ways to break up the text into meaningful chunks for analysis, as well as the analysis itself.

Mark Ravina, Emory University

Political Discourse in Early Meiji Japan

How did early Meiji-era political activists voice their criticism of the state? How did their language change as they adopted new concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy? My project addresses these questions through an analysis of kenpakusho, “memorials” or petitions. Between 1867 and 1889, the Meiji government received nearly 4000 petitions on an astonishing array of subjects: treaty revision, conscription, education, tax reform, postal regulations, religion, and marriage ceremonies. Petitioners included daimyo, samurai, priests, monks, and commoners. These thousands of petitions constitute a small “big data” corpus: small enough for analysis on a microcomputer, but too large for an exacting close reading of all the texts. My preliminary DH analysis of the petitions reveals how Meiji political discourse, especially that of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement (Jiyū minken undō), built on older political discourse. I have mapped, for example, how the term jiyū took on its modern meaning of “freedom,” building on older Confucian critiques of despotism. Using techniques ranging from simple comparison of word frequency to topic modeling, I have begun to model the emergence of a new language that legitimized political contestation and dissent.

Susan Burns, University of Chicago

Mapping Medical Edo/Tokyo

In recent years, medical historians and others have complicated our understanding of the process of medical modernization in Japan by drawing attention to issues such as gender and class, the role of the state, the economics of care, competition between professionals, and the tension between the perspective of professionals and patients. However, to this point, little attention has been paid to space and place as factors that have shaped access to, the reception of, and perceptions of new and traditional forms of medical knowledge and practice. This presentation explores the usefulness and the limits of ArcGIS for doing the social history of medicine through a case study of private (i.e., for profit) leprosy hospitals in late nineteenth century Tokyo.

Japan’s first leprosy law, passed in 1907, authorized the establishment of five regional leprosy sanitaria. Initially, the Home Ministry called for them to be situated in places that were close to major population centers, easily accessible, and with a healthy environment. For example, Meguro village, just outside Tokyo, was the planned site for the Kantō institution. However, the opposition of local residents forced officials to alter their plan and eventually the sanitarium came to be established in Higashiyama-mura, a site near the border with Saitama which one physician described as the “Hokkaido of Tokyo.” How can we understand this “not in my backyard” response? Did it reflect longstanding resistance to living in close proximity to sufferers of the disease, a new post-Germ- theory concern for infection, or something else?

As a means for exploring popular attitudes towards the disease, I examine the historical moment that preceded the 1907 law. In the period between 1880-1904, private leprosy hospitals proliferated in Tokyo. I have identified eighteen in total, and at least two of these were of considerable scale, housing between 500-700 patients, among them a significant number of non-Japanese who travelled to Japan for treatment. I use ArcGIS to explore the place of these institutions in the urban landscape of Tokyo. Where were they located, what shaped their placement, and what might this tell us about attitudes towards leprosy and its sufferers?

Joel Legassie, University of Victoria

Can you Sing a Map?

This presentation will consider two interesting and difficult methodological and theoretical questions that have arisen while constructing a digital gazetteer of Ainu language place names from Meiji-era government documents and maps. First, how can we best incorporate technical skills within traditional scholarly research and pedagogical practices? And secondly, can digital tools help us better understand the contributions and full agency of people whose voices are appropriated or erased in official documentation, or do they simply amplify the language and structure embedded within these tempting targets for digitization and computational analysis? Discussion of these questions should be free flowing, but examples drawn from research exploring the history of information in the processes of modernization and nation building in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Hokkaido will be used to guide and focus the inquiry.

Jonathan Zwicker, University of California, Berkeley

On Scale

One of the starting points of what has developed into the digital humanities was a renewed attention to problems of scale: instead of the unique and the individual, digital humanities proposes to examine the ‘normal’ and the repetitive; instead of the solitary, the serial; instead of the close, the distant. This approach has produced a new way of thinking about literary history and an entirely new set of scholarly objects in which the book fades away behind the catalogue, the text behind the corpus. At the same time, many literary historians are still faced with the nagging problem of specificity: how do we make sense of this text in this location at this time? How can the distant be brought into conversation with the proximate, what does it mean to do micro history in the age of distant reading? In this talk I will explore some of these problems of scale by way of a personal library collected over the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century and by trying to think about how some of the tools of macro-analysis can inform a micro-historical approach to the literary culture of Japan’s nineteenth century.

Jonathan Abel, Penn State University

On Collecting Data

This presentation will focus on problems with data collection in three unrelated projects.  First, I will discuss some cautionary differences between received or found source data (that which is collected by others) and active data collection (through scraping), drawing on the example of Twitter. Second, I will introduce some of the problems with managing a group of data collectors through a discussion of the Japanese data portion of CINEmap, a project I am working on with colleagues to geotag scenes in world cinema in order to reconnect spaces captured on film with the world. Third, I will introduce the issue of data creation via a project that attempts to code generic categories within the Journal of Japanese Studies and Monumenta Nipponica in order to substantiate field-level speculation on changing interests, factions, and debates in Japanese Studies.

Hoyt Long, University of Chicago

On Aozora Bunko as Archive

Aozora Bunko began in 1997 as a crowd-sourced initiative to create a public digital library for literary and other works no longer under copyright. It now comprises some 13,000 texts and is arguably one of the most promising resources for data-driven studies of modern Japanese literary history. In this talk, I will consider the possibilities and limitations of Aozora Bunko as a digital archive that sits in relation to “modern Japanese literature” as a historical construct, but also transcends it in specific ways. A brief a history of the archive and a statistical analysis of its composition will be a chance to raise questions about its “representativeness” as an archive and about the problem of historical sampling in general. I will also introduce some of the new forms of analysis that this archive makes possible, ranging from an advanced search interface (“Aozora Search”) that I have created with colleagues at Chicago, to more advanced methods in natural language processing and machine learning that make it possible to distant-read at the scale of hundreds, or thousands of texts. Ultimately, Aozora Bunko provides a frame with which to think through the digital future of Japanese literary studies.

Toshinobu Ogiso, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

On Japanese Corpora and Tokenization

TBD