2024

In March 2024, the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) launched the new "Nichibunken Digital Archive," an IIIF-based archive of image materials in our collection. Currently, the archive includes the contents of "Yoshida Hatsusaburō Bird's-eye View Maps," "Picture Scrolls," and "Folklore Illustrations" databases and will be expanded in the future. The presentation will introduce its functions and future development.
The presenter is researching and partially implementing machine learning and generative AI technologies for our text databases to facilitate advanced search and content understanding, as well as knowledge discovery using digital humanities methods.

This presentation will introduce new resources from the National Institutes for the Humanities and the National Museum of Japanese History and explain the major trends in Digital Humanities (DH) and Digital Archives (DA) in Japan. Following the establishment of the DH Promotion Office, the National Institutes for the Humanities has been actively engaged in various DH-related activities. Although the discussion on resources will primarily focus on nihuBridge, this presentation will also provide comprehensive information on diverse related activities and outline the trends and future directions of digital research materials in Japan.

With increasing attention to digital humanities (DH) in Japan, there are high expectations for educational content for human resource development related to DH. In Japan, however, institutions capable of providing DH education on an organizational basis are rare. As a result, there is no accumulated curriculum, making it difficult to conduct DH education in a systematic method. There are also few opportunities to learn about the attractiveness and potential of DH, which is a necessary prerequisite for human resource development.
To address these issues, the National Institutes for the Humanities is developing the "DH Lecture Program" and "DH Podcast & LOD," which will provide researchers' "narratives" on humanities research and related resources, and connect them to society and the future.

The National Institute of Japanese Literature NIJL has started a new project, "Model Building in the Humanities through Data-Driven Problem Solving", in 2024.
NIJL had digitized 300,000 pre-modern Japanese texts under the "NIJL-NW project". In the new project, 150,000 digitized pre-modern works will be added in collaboration with various institutions, including those overseas. In addition, we are going to try extracting full-text of digital images from pre-modern works.
We will also improve the functionality of the "Union Catalogue Database of Japanese Texts (国書データベース)" and enrich its content. Based on this database, we will promote the "Data-driven research" and other projects.
In this presentation, we will introduce an overview of our new project and further efforts regarding this database (e.g., text data creation by OCR).