2024

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).