Nov 10, 2020
Digital Scholarship in the Study of Historical Japanese Earthquakes
- 12:00 to 13:30
- Digital Humanities Workshop
- Research IT
- Yuta Hashimoto
In this talk, the speaker will share his experiences of involvement in a long-term digital project in the field of historical seismology. Since 2014, he has been a member of Historical Earthquake Study Group (HESG) at Kyoto University and has worked on the development of IT systems for the group. HESG is a joint group of seismologists and historians who have been studying pre-modern earthquake records for seismic research and disaster prevention. Since instrumental observation of earthquakes in Japan began only after the end of nineteenth century, transcribing written records is required for studying past earthquakes. Therefore, Japanese seismologists have developed extensive collaborations with historians and archivists.
On the other hand, the number of records to be transcribed is vast and cannot be handled by a small group of scholars. This prompted the members of HESG to consider using crowdsourcing for transcribing the historical earthquake records. The system HESG launched in 2017, Minna de Honkoku, invites the general public to transcribe historical earthquake records via the Internet. As of August 2020, more than 6,000 people have participated in transcribing and 500 historical records have been transcribed. The total number of characters transcribed reached 11 million. This project also makes use of some novel technologies including International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and AI-based handwriting recognition (HWR).
Our next goal is to extract and visualize spatio-temporal information from the transcribed texts, so that seismic analysis on these historical records will be possible. Unfortunately, the standard text mining techniques do not work for our purpose because morphological analysis of pre-modern Japanese texts is quite difficult. For this, we started manual annotation of these texts using online tools such as TextAE and PubAnnotation, both of which were developed for annotating academic papers but also applicable to historical texts. Once this process is done, we will be able to link the annotations with a historical gazetteer and generate their visualizations.
Contact and Registration
Please email Research IT Group for the Zoom link.
All are welcome to attend, regardless of prior experience of the digital humanities. Registration is required for external participants. To register, and for further information on the Digital Humanities Brown Bag Lunch series email Research IT Group.
About This Series
Brown Bag Lunch is a bi-weekly meeting of researchers at the MPIWG who use or want to learn more about digital research methods, broadly encompassed by the term Digital Humanities. In the Brown Bag Lunch meetings, researchers can discuss tools, share ideas and experiences (good and bad), and learn from each other. Each session explores a new topic; workshops are usually interactive, and we often invite external speakers. Please feel free to bring your lunch, and a laptop or notebook in order to participate!