September 4, 2008

Masao Kawashima (Day 1, Part 1)

Masao Kawashima  (Professor, Graduate School of Letters, Ritsumeikan University)

Early Modern Genre Paintings and the Digital Humanities

This presentation raises some issues to which we have to give consideration, when analyzing genre paintings created in the early modern period or before. While having seen some successful cases of digital archiving of paintings, such as that of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints), we still have to deal with quite a few problems, technological or otherwise. For example, when introducing information technology such as digital archiving into conventional academic fields in the Humanities, we have to reconsider their established premises, including the relationship between researchers who want to study paintings as research materials and their owners’ copy rights. I will discuss these issues with a couple of actual examples.