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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.

 

September 4, 2008

Ryo Akama (Day 1, Part 1)

Ryo Akama (Professor, Graduate School of Letters, Ritsumeikan University)

Roles of Image Databases in Art and Cultural Research 

Without having some personal and/or research connections, researchers outside often have a hard time conducting research on artworks and artifacts, housed in museums. They have to wait for museum exhibitions to get access to the collections. As for the museums, they have their own responsibilities to identify their collections and to restore them. Collection owners have their “ownership,” thus “privilege to control collection information.” In short, all these responsibilities and rights had made our academic environment exclusive. A breakthrough to it was made by publicly accessible online databases of museum collections, which collection owners started to regard as an ace card to win operational cost or a litmus test, thus, an urgent issue in many countries.
With the online databases, researchers without particular personal connections came to possess enormous volume of information. What we have to think about now is how to make their research outcomes public and share information while paying back to collection owners who waived their privilege to control collection information. Taking a case of the ukiyo-e database I developed, I would like to suggest a few ways to do it.

 

September 4, 2008

Keiji Yano (Day 1, Part 1)

Keiji Yano (Professor, Graduate School of Letters, Ritsumeikan University)

Geographical Information Systems and Digital Humanities: Revolution or Evolution

Geography has experienced two revolutions in information technology since World War II; the Quantitative Revolution and GIS (Geographical Information Systems) Revolution. The former has introduced a positivist epistemological framework in Human Geography as well as statistical and mathematical methods. The latter has facilitated the dispersion of GIS as a tool for handling digital maps and given rise to GIScience as a new interdisciplinary research field. This paper explores the present situation and future prospects of Digital Humanities based on the experience of Geography and GIScience.

 

September 4, 2008

Kozaburo Hachimura (Day 1, Part 1)

Kozaburo Hachimura (Professor, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University)

Digital Archive of Dancing with Motion Capture

Our research on digital archiving of human body motion and its application will be presented. This is one of the case studies of Digital Humanities research in art and culture field. Human body motion data are obtained by using an optical type motion capture system. Motion data are used for not only archiving but also several data analysis research. Analyses include identification of dance motions and/or dancers, and extraction of characteristic parts from the sequence of dance motion. Furthermore, motion data retrieval based on the similarity of body motion itself, and extracting relationships between 'Kansei' (emotional) factors which and body motions will be presented. Topics of creation of computer graphics animations and a trial of making a dance collaboration system in virtual reality environment will also be shown.

 

September 4, 2008

Mitsuyuki Inaba (Day 1, Part 1)

Mitsuyuki Inaba (Professor, Graduate School of Policy Science, Ritsumeikan University; Associate Member, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego)

The World Wide Web and Digital Humanities: A Once and Future Discipline

The World Wide Web keeps on developing as an infrastructure for sharing and exchanging knowledge among not only academe but also all kind of social activities. A new trend called Web 2.0 reduces the gap between experts and non-experts, and leads us to engage in participative and collaborative creation around the world. Semantic Web is a key concept for the next stage after Web 2.0, which interconnects various artifacts and cultural heritages to implement human/machine intelligible knowledge bases on the Web. This development of the Web that aims at the integration of human wisdom with the digital technology was already anticipated at its birth. In this presentation, the future vision of Digital Humanities will be discussed by overviewing the history of the Web evolution.

 

September 4, 2008

Masanori Aoyagi (Day 1, Part 2)

Masanori Aoyagi (Director, National Museum of Western Art)

Analogue and Digital Information in the Humanities

Since 1999, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, I had created highest-quality digital image archives of murals in Pompei, Italy. At the same time, I produced a video, computer graphic reconstruction of Casa di Jiulio Polibio. These research projects let me realize that digitalized information has rather crucial vulnerability in its record preservation aspect, which led to my 2006 publication of Pompei (Regiones VI-VII) -Insula Occidentalis. I will elucidate why I made this publication, a catalogue of murals in Pompei, by comparing analogue and digital information. 
 

September 4, 2008

Ian N. Gregory (Day 1, Part 2)

 Ian N. Gregory (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Lancaster University)
 
A Place in the Humanities

The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has become well established in historical research, especially in those aspects of history concerned with the analysis of statistical sources such as the census, or cartographic ones such as old maps. This work has had a numberof successes in demonstrating the importance of geography in historical analyses. More recently there have been calls for GIS to be used across the humanities. If this is to happen approaches to GIS need to be developed that allow it to be used with texts, the type of source most widely used in the humanities. This paper will review how GIS has been used in historical research to date and demonstrate how it can be applied to new disciplines such as Literary Studies.
 

September 4, 2008

Eero Hyvönen (Day 1, Part 2)

Eero Hyvönen (Professor of semantic media technology at the Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Media Technology, and a docent of computer science at the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science)

CultureSampo: Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web 2.0

The presentation will include discussion and demonstrations of the semantic web 2.0 portal CultureSampo portal (http://www.kulttuurisampo,fi/) and the underlying national ontology service infrastucture ONKI (http://www.yso.fi).  The systems presented are part of the national FinnONTO project (http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/finnonto/) developing a national semantic web infrastructure in Finland and applications based on it.

 

September 4, 2008

Richard C. Beacham (Day 1, Part 2)

Richard C. Beacham (Professor of Digital Culture, King’s College London)
 
The Future of the Past: New Developments in Computer Based Cultural Heritage Research
 
This presentation will consider some recent work undertaken by the King’s Visualisation Lab and its international partners creating virtual objects and architecture embodying and enabling cultural heritage research. These projects also undertake new pedagogical explorations of real time multi-user online environments, and in particular the Second Life Virtual World. Current work in progress includes “Theatron 3”, the building and decoration of some 25 major historical theatres, together with relevant scenery, costumes and performance activities. Other KVL led projects focus on the first scientific survey and publication of the “Roman Villa of Oplontis”, near Pompeii (which will be realised both in a highly detailed 3D model, and a Second Life version), and work on the “Theatres at Pompeii” – including the depiction of virtual performance -- arising from our collaborative archaeological investigations with the University of Melbourne.
 

September 4, 2008

Neil Fraistat (Day 1, Part 2)

Neil Fraistat (Professor of English & Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland)
 
The Digital Humanities, Local and Global
 
The emergence of the Digital Humanities as a coherent field in the 1990s was accompanied by and largely a result of the concomitant evolution of the Digital Humanities Center as an institution. Such centers have become important laboratories for the application of information technology to the humanities; powerful advocates for the significance of such work; crucial focal points for the theorization of the Digital Humanities as a field; and local nodes for what is being called in North America “cyberinfrastructure.” I will discuss the history and function of Digital Humanities Centers, focusing especially on their role in cyberinfrastructure and on the centerNet initiative, which seeks to create a truly global network of local digital humanities centers.

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