国際共同利用・共同研究拠点関連

The 14th Forum for Knowledge, Arts, and Culture in Digital Humanities will be held on Saturday, March 22, 2025.

We are now accepting →registrations to join the event as a participant. This event also serves as a conference for young researchers of the ARC-iJAC.

About the Forum for Knowledge, Arts, and Culture in Digital Humanities

 Along with the rapid development of the digital and information environment in recent years, we are seeing more and more cross-disciplinary research in academic fields with an awareness of "information" and "digital". This trend is gaining momentum in higher education and research activities as well, and educational programs and course activities related to this trend are being enhanced.

　The need for opportunities for academic exchange among undergraduate and graduate students and young researchers studying in such programs under new research themes in line with the times is ever increasing.

　For this reason, the Forum for Knowledge, Arts, and Culture in Digital Humanities was established in 2011 as a place for presentation and exchange, with a focus on graduate students and young researchers interested in information and knowledge research in arts, culture, and other related fields, and 13 research meetings have been held to date.

　This meeting is positioned as a place where participants can mutually discover new research themes and methods through human exchange in different fields, and we also welcome exploratory and adventurous presentations that are slightly different from conventional conference presentations.

■ Date: March 22 (Sat), 2025, from 12:30 noon JST

■ Hybrid format
Venue: Future Plaza Conferece Room, Ritsumeikan University Osaka Ibaraki Campus
(https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/futureplaza/conferencehall/)

Online via ZOOM.

■ Program & presentation abstracts: Please click →here (in Japanese).

■ Register as a participant: Please register via →Google Forms. (Deadline: Wednesday, March 19, 2025)

※ There is no participation fee.

※A get-together is planned to be held after the research presentations (face-to-face only). We would like to make it a place for exchange beyond the boundaries of universities and research fields, so please feel free to join us. The venue, participation fee, etc. will be announced shortly.

Organizer: The Forum for Knowledge, Arts, and Culture in Digital Humanities

Facilitators: Ryo Akama (Ritsumeikan University), Mamiko Sakata (Doshisha University), Naoki Takubo (Kindai University), Takehiko Murakawa (Wakayama University), Ryosuke Yamanishi (Kansai University)

Co-organizers: The Kansai Division of the Art Documentation Society and the Kansai Division of the Japan Society of Information and Knowledge

In cooperation with: International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC), Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University.

Inquiries: kacimeeting+2025■gmail.com (please change "■" to "@")

■ Related links:

→Japan Art Documentation Society

The Art Research Center (ARC) at Ritsumeikan University is pleased to announce the full-scale operation of the ARC Japanese Old Maps Portal Database. This database includes not only valuable historical maps from the ARC's collection but also major collections from institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, with a total of over 5,000 old maps available.

As part of this update, 311 old maps of Japan from the British Library have been added to the database. In conjunction with this, we have introduced a pyramid (tiled) display function based on the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) standard, allowing users to view maps more smoothly.

ARC Japanese Old Maps Portal Database
https://www.dh-jac.net/db/maps/search_portal.php

Database of Japanese Old Maps in the British Library Collection
https://www.dh-jac.net/db/maps/search_BL.php

Moving forward, we plan to gradually implement this pyramid display function for old maps already added to this database previously. Furthermore, we will continue to expand the database by incorporating other collections.

To facilitate accessibility and utilization, we will also work towards integrating this database with external platforms such as Japan Search, ensuring that a wider audience can benefit from this resource. This will begin with the British Library maps becoming available on Japan Search by the end of March 2025 (tentative).

We hope you find this database useful for your research.

Day 1: Friday, February 21, 10:00 -16:50 JST (tentative)
Day 2: Saturday, February 22, 10:00 -17:00 JST (tentative)

Hybrid event (ARC & online via Zoom)

Presentations marked with ★ are available via YouTube live stream.

Organised by: International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC) & Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures "Program for Supporting Research Center Formation", Ritsumeikan University

Click here for the program.

Day 1: Friday, February 21, 10:00 -16:50 JST (tentative)
Day 2: Saturday, February 22, 10:00 -17:00 JST (tentative)

Hybrid event (ARC & online via Zoom)

Presentations marked with ★ are available via YouTube live stream.

Organised by: International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC) & Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures "Program for Supporting Research Center Formation", Ritsumeikan University

Click here for the program.

A special session of the International ARC Seminar under the theme of "The online publication of the ARC's Japanese old maps, including the British Library Map Collection" will be held as a webinar on Wednesday, February 19, 18:00-20:00 JST.

About this seminar:
Since the 2000s, historical GIS, which combines historical geography and geographic information science, has been rapidly developing in Japan and around the world as part of digital humanities. However, most of the geospatial data in Japan, such as modern maps and ledgers, has not been digitized and is not available in GIS format. In order to develop historical GIS, it is essential to digitize paper-based geospatial data, convert it to GIS format, and make it publicly available. Furthermore, in order to make it available to people who are not GIS experts, such as museum curators and educators, it is necessary to provide an easy-to-use framework for online searching and GIS analysis.

This seminar will introduce the development of 1) the 'ARC Map Portal Database', which is a platform for old Japanese maps, 2) the Japanese version of "Map Warper," and 3) "Old Japanese Maps Online." With these components, users will be able to search for and select old maps, share geo-referenced maps, and create detailed maps on a variety of topics.

In order to create the ARC Map Portal Database, we will digitize old maps held by institutions in Japan and overseas, make them publicly available, and publish them on Japan Search. The maps will be standardized with bilingual metadata in Japanese and English to facilitate searching. Map Warper in Japan will make the maps available for non-commercial use, and will introduce crowdsourced georeferencing to improve the accuracy of the maps.

In this seminar, we will report on the digitization and publication of nearly 400 old Japanese maps held by the British Library, which has one of the world's largest map collections, and we will hear about the content from Dr Xia-Kang Ziyi of Oxford University.

The program is as follows:

Moderator: Dr. Travis Seifman (Associate Professor, Kinugasa Research Organization/ARC Research Manager)

18:00-18:45
Speaker: Dr. Xia-Kang Ziyi (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford)
Topic: "Pre-modern Japanese Maps at the British Library: Past and Present"

18:45-19:15
Speaker: Prof. Yano Keiji (Geography Department, College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University/ARC Deputy Director)
Topic: "Online Construction of Japanese Old Maps"

19:15-20:00 Q&A, Demonstration

About the speakers:

Dr. Xia-Kang Ziyi (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford)
Xia-Kang recently completed her DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, and her thesis examines the agency of the Tsushima domain in Tokugawa Japan-Chosŏn Korea relations. She is interested in diplomacy and cross-cultural interactions in early modern East Asia, as well as the political authorities of Tokugawa Japan. In early 2023, Xia-Kang worked with Tom Harper, the Curator of Antiquarian Mapping of the British Library, on the doctoral placement project 'Pre-1900 Japanese-produced maps in the British Library'. She now teaches at Oxford.

Prof. Keiji Yano (Geography Department and Art Research, Ritsumeikan University)
Keiji Yano (B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D. (D.Sc.)) has been Professor of Human Geography and Geographic Information Science at the Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan since April 2002. Before joining Ritsumeikan in 1992, he was at the Tokyo Metropolitan University as Assistant Professor of Geography, where he also earned his Master and PhD degrees in Geography. His professional roles include being Member of Science Council of Japan (https://www.scj.go.jp/en/index.html), The president of the Human Geographical Society of Japan (http://hgsj.org/english/), the Councilor of the Association of Japanese Geographers(https://www.ajg.or.jp/en/), and the past president of GIS Association of Japan (https://www.gisa-japan.org/english/index.html). His research interests are grouped around the use of Geographical Information Systems and quantitative methods in urban analysis. This includes information integration within GIS, geodemographics, geodesign, spatial interaction models, urban modelling, virtual cities, digital humanities, history of quantitative geography, and history of GIS.

Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 18:00 - 20:00 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (affiliated parties only, no reservation required)

*This webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are invited to participate via YouTube.

Background:
Akiko Yano studied in Japan for a BA in international relations at Tsuda College, and for a MA and PhD in Japanese art history at Keio University. She specialises in Japanese painting history. She had an opportunity to study in the UK for one year as a visiting PhD student, based at SOAS University of London, thanks to a scholarship provided by the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC). She continued working in the UK, first as a Research Assistant for the SOAS-British Museum (BM) project on Osaka actor prints 'Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage: 1780-1830' (2005), and then as a Research Fellow for the SOAS-BM project on shunga 'Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art' (2013). After joining the BM as a curator in 2015, she has been responsible, with two other colleague curators, for the Japanese collection, which holds over 40,000 objects.

Dr. Yano, thank you very much for your time today. What initially sparked your interest in Japanese art history?

Yano: I was interested in art (mainly painting) and history as a teenager, but I was not particularly looking at the discipline of art history for my BA as I was more interested in international relations through cultural communication. Thinking about my future career, however, I realised that I would feel more of a sense of mission if I could work on the preservation of the cultural heritage of Japan, and hence learnt, belatedly, about a job called a 'curator'. From that point onwards, I switched my specialty to art history with an emphasis on Japanese art history since I was in Japan and thought Japanese art would be easily accessible.

How did your connection with the Art Research Center (ARC) begin?

Yano: I learnt about the ARC's digitisation projects when I was in London as a visiting PhD student at SOAS. Prof. Akama was also based at SOAS on a sabbatical at about the same time. He was then digitising actor prints in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, and I was fortunate enough to have a chance to help with his photography sessions once or twice. It was a revelation. For an art history student in the early 2000s, photographs (using film!) of objects served primarily as my personal records to assist my memory of what I saw in the actual objects. The idea of systematic and end-to-end digital photography of a collection, which would exist online as a digital entity of that collection, available to the widest possible users, impressed me. When I was working as a Research Assistant for the Osaka actor prints project at SOAS, I actively used the ukiyo-e database, which Prof. Akama had created at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum at Waseda University as well as at the ARC. He collaborated with the Osaka project by digitising a large-scale private collection of Osaka actor prints in Germany.

Yano: It has been a long-time ambition within the Japanese curatorial team at the British Museum to make use of the remarkable collection of paintings, prints, and illustrated books from Kyoto and Osaka in the collection, which has been acquired by the Museum over many years since the late 19^th century. The major exhibitions at the BM featuring Kyoto and Osaka artists in the past were 'Japanese Paintings & Prints: The Maruyama/Shijō School' (1976) and 'The Schools of Ganku and Bunchō' (1977) both by the then curator Lawrence Smith, and, more recently, 'Images of Kyoto & Osaka' (1997) by Tim Clark. It has been over a quarter of a century since the last exhibition, and the curators kept/keep acquiring Kamigata materials.

The most direct incentive for me to form the research project was the large-scale acquisition of the Scott Johnson collection of Kamigata surimono (so-called Shijō surimono), consisting of over 1600 items (if we count each sheet of surimono pasted in albums and accompanying surimono wrappers, it comes to be more than 2000) in 2021. It was our predecessor Tim Clark's final major acquisition as a BM curator. Significant in terms of scale and quality, this acquisition hugely enhanced our Kyoto-Osaka collection.

The more I looked into each of the surimono, the clearer it became that artists in Kyoto and Osaka were deeply involved in the world of haikai and kyōka. Not only that, but there are also thousands of individuals in surimono who contributed poems and pictures, who appear under their pen names and are unknown today. Who were they? How did they get involved in these surimono? What was going on, culturally, in late Edo period Japan?

I first encountered Kamigata surimono and the idea of 'salon' in the Osaka actor prints project, led by Prof. Andrew Gerstle of SOAS. The BM Japanese collection curators had been receiving generous advice from the late Prof. Nakatani Nobuo (Kansai University) about our Kyoto-Osaka painting collection. At the same time, Prof. Akama was spearheading the digitisation of the BM Japanese collection and built a system of databases at the ARC. All these threads of ideas, personal connections, academic activities, and advice converged into one as a research project. It is based on long-term working relationships among scholars in the UK and Japan, which has enabled us to embark on this 'salons' project to investigate a wide range of cultural participation of people of the late Edo period, centering in and around Kyoto and Osaka. Our scope at this stage includes any cultural activities that formed a communal space (real or virtual) for those who were interested in joining for pleasure, self-improvement, or whatever the reason, as long as there is evidence available in primary materials. In our project we call such a space a 'salon'. Primary materials are being digitised by the ARC team, and the project members are inputting relevant information - mainly about the persons involved - into the database. Our project is in a field where more traditional humanities study methods and digital technologies meet. Calling it 'digital humanities' might be easier, but our project is keeping an interesting balance between 'humanities' and 'digital.' Both benefit from each other to deepen our knowledge of the phenomenon of Japanese 'salons.'

While Edo (Tokyo) has been more comprehensively studied, the cultural history of the Kamigata region (Osaka and Kyoto) has remained relatively niche, at least in English. Did this influence your motivation to initiate this research project?

Yano: The situation is similar in Japanese as well. It was not really the original motivation to leverage the Kamigata profile, but it was and still is true that there was so much artistic material produced in the Kyoto-Osaka region that has as yet remained significantly underexplored.

The research outcomes of this collaborative project are currently being showcased in a one-year Special Display at the British Museum. Could you tell us about the unique appeal and key features of this Special Display?

Yano: The ongoing special display in the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries at the British Museum (until 30^th March 2025) is one of the outcomes of the project. However, an academic research project and a public display each expect quite different audiences. For the general audience outside Japan who visit the British Museum, we need to start by explaining where Kyoto and Osaka are geographically, how vertically written Japanese text would be read, and so on. In addition, as the display is in the permanent collection gallery, the physical aspects of the space, such as the size and layout of the display cases, are fixed. We adopted a narrative so it would fit the objects nicely into the existing space, which sometimes posed a curatorial challenge. We also published a book to accompany the display, Salon Culture in Japan: Making Art, 1750-1900 (British Museum Press, 2024).

The display showcases in the first room representations of vibrant city life in Kyoto and Osaka, and the artistic currents of the late 18^th to the 19^th centuries mainly through paintings and illustrated books. Major Maruyama-Shijō school and other Kamigata artists' works are on display as well as some collaborative works (gassaku) among them. In the second room, the focus shifts to people's various hobby activities and cultural interests. The concept of 'salons' is introduced here as we feature group activities, such as haikai groups with surimono, sencha (infused tea) gatherings, and anthologies of poems and pictures by multiple authors. All the objects on display are from the British Museum's collection. Visitors are pleasantly surprised to learn about this rich section of our collection.

Given that part of this collaborative project was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, how did the ARC's database system and digital infrastructure support the implementation and realization of this project?

Yano: Covid-19 had a significant impact on our formation of the project. It was a time of no travelling nationally or internationally when we were planning the research grant application. It was a norm, previously, to travel between partner countries when conducting an international project.

The parallel aim of our project is to measure how it is possible to collaborate internationally without physically travelling. The ARC had already been a strong partner to the British Museum Japanese collection team. Building on that, as the core of our project, we set up an online database system, where digital images of relevant primary materials, text from transcriptions, and extracted person information can be accumulated, accessed, and searched for research by the project members from anywhere on earth. Each active member has assigned material to work on and input into the online database. Findings and work in progress can be shared in online meetings and workshops. The active use of online platforms for a meeting is a positive legacy from the era of Covid-19.

Do you have any personal favorites within the Japanese Collection at the British Museum that you would like to share?

Yano: I think that Banka jinmei roku (Who's Who from Myriad Houses, 1813, 1991,1112,0.75.1-5) is one of the key works for the project, and I am never bored by looking at each page. It is a who's who of haikai poets across Japan, complied by the Osaka poet and shipping agent Shime Chōsai (1757-1824). He called for applications from haiku poets in Japan's south and north, east and west, and put together more than 400 individuals' information. Each entry has a standardised format: a portrait of the poet, a haiku of their composition, their pen name, and a short biography. The entry order was, according to the hanrei (note at the beginning of the book), organised on a first-come-first-served basis, rather than based on skill or social status. This approach demonstrates the ethos of 'salon culture'. Based on the poets' biographies provided, we find courtiers, samurai, merchants, farmers, priests, scholars, artists, doctors, men and women, old and young, in one book. It is fascinating.

Is there anything else you would like to comment on or highlight?

Yano: The ARC has digitised almost all the prints and books (both out of copyright) in the British Museum Japanese collection under their international digital humanities scheme. Thanks to their work, an incredible number of images - hundreds of thousands - of prints and pages of books can be viewed through our Collection Online by anyone interested all over the world. This serves specialists and general users alike. The impact of this visual presence is massive; Japanese art objects can be viewed and appreciated, stimulating interest in Japanese culture more broadly. We are most grateful to the ARC, and hope to continue working with the ARC in the future.

Photo courtesy of the British Museum/Dr. Akiko Yano.

(This interview was conducted by Yinzi Emily Li)

On January 6, 2025, an article in the newspaper "San-in Chuo Shimpo" introduced the initiative led by Prof. Ryo Akama (College of Letters/Director of the ARC) to make the digitized materials in the collection of the Tsukiji Sugoroku Museum available to the public through the ARC database system,.

The database, containing 650 Sugoroku items, representing about 500 different kinds of Sugoroku game boards, dating from the Edo period to the early 1950s, has been collected by Osamu Yoshida, President of the Tsukiji Sugoroku Museum (https://sugoroku.net/).

Tsukiji Sugoroku Museum Database:
■ URL：https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/search_tkjSG.php

Related article: https://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/j/news/pc/023655.html

Illustrated books, ukiyo-e painting manuals, and other early modern Japanese books in the collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History of Belgium are now available online, with images for each page:
https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/books/search_belgium.php

These works can also be found by searching for "MRAH" in the "Owner" field in the ARC Early Japanese Books Portal Database: https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/books/search_portal.php

Takagi Yoko previously conducted a survey of the Museums' collection of early modern Japanese books, and published a simple listing of works in the collection in: "Berugii oritsu bijutsu rekishi hakubutsukan shozo wakan kosho ni tsuite," Bunka joshi daigaku kiyo: jinbun / shakai kagaku kenkyu, vol. 9 (2001 Jan), pp. 187-206. Click here to view or download the article: https://bunka.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/686.

The Art Research Center has maintained a digital archive of the Museums' collection of ukiyo-e since 2007. Roughly 8,750 ukiyo-e works can be viewed in the ARC Japanese Prints (Ukiyo-e) and Paintings Portal Database.

Following the digitization of ukiyo-e prints, the project was then continued, in order to produce a digital archive of early modern books. However, the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the project, and publication online was delayed. The project was restarted in 2023, and 572 books, with images for each page, have now been released online.

The size of the images made publicly available in the ARC databases is limited. For those who wish to use larger images from these works, please inquire directly with the Image Studio at the Royal Museums of Art and History of Belgium.

The 145th International ARC Seminar will be held as a webinar on Wednesday, January 15, from 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Speakers: Kiichi SUGANUMA (JSPS Post-doctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University)

Topic: 'The Possibilities of Digital Collection in Western Medieval-Renaissance Study'

Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (affiliated parties only, no reservation required)

*This webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are invited to participate via YouTube.