The Database of Pre-modern Japanese Works: More than 80,000 items in hand

Kazuhiro Okada - Center for Collaborative Research on Pre-modern Texts, National Institute of Japanese Literature (Japan), Kuninori Matsuda - Center for Collaborative Research on Pre-modern Texts, National Institute of Japanese Literature (Japan), Keiichi Tanikawa - Center for Collaborative Research on Pre-modern Texts, National Institute of Japanese Literature (Japan)

Presentation type: Lightning talk

Abstract:

National Institute of Japanese Literature, Japan, launched the Database of Pre-modern Japanese Works in October 2018. It aims to be a portal of the whole pre-modern Works in the Japanese language, plenty of which continued more than a thousand years before 1868. Setting a goal in digitization of 300,000 items of pre-modern Japanese works spread nationwide, as of February 2019, we present approximately 84,000 items in the Database: it counts more than 10,000,000 images.

The Database distributes such a large collection of images using IIIF. As well as the default viewer of Mirador in our website, IIIF helps us in realizing numerous features of the Database: ‘tag’ annotations to images and ‘kuzushiji search’ or word-spotting query for handwritten cursives. Experimental services, not strictly within the features of Database, are implemented by IIIF, including ‘kotenseki sketch search’ or a search by sketching. We will discuss how the use of IIIF broadens the future of pre-modern Japanese explorations.

Topics:

• Annotation, including full-text or academic use cases,
• IIIF Implementation Spectrum: large-scale or small-scale projects,
• Implementations of IIIF outside of North America/Europe

Keywords:

• Pre-modern East Asian materials,
• Pre-modern Japanese materials; Annotation; Word-spotting