I am at the 2nd International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures, DH-JAC 2011. I am writing a live conference report here on philosophi.ca. Yesterday I presented a response to Mitsuyuki Inaba’s survey of the work of the Web Technologies group (PDF) of the Global COE Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures.
Here you can see my slides from my response to Professor Inaba (PDF). I made three points. Here are my speaking notes:
1. Challenges and Lessons of Global Research
A common issue that comes up in conferences here in Japan is the importance of participating in global research. The chancellor alluded to this in his welcome address. Participating in global research often means everyone reading and publishing in English which adds a significant burden to those who are not fluent.
There are, however, alternatives. First, I think researchers in English-speaking countries need to share the burden and that may mean thinking seriously about training in conducting research outside of English. Our graduate students need to learn about the work of the Art Research Centre. They need to learn to use machine translation to translate abstracts and papers they can’t read.
There are however dangers in global research. For one thing it is easy to trade in stereotypes about other cultures. It is easy to fall into drawing inferences from a few encounters. An obvious danger is mistranslation – especially if we start encouraging students to use automatic translation to expand their horizons.
Finally there is a danger that we invent each other. The two images on this slide are from the wonderful MIT site Visualizing Cultures that show how a japanese and american artist represented the same person differently, commodore Perry.
Let us ask what are the barriers and how can we use IT to overcome them? The Digital Humanities Centre for Japanese Arts and Culture has been experimenting with how to use the Internet to overcome time and space barriers. What other barriers are there and how can this become a research issue for the rest of us in the digital humanities?
Finally I should ask what the point of global research is? I don’t think we will overcome the barriers if it is simply a matter of reputation – of being important internationally. The main value of global research is that only when you cross cultures do you really begin to understand the limitations of your own research perspective.
In that spirit I want to share two things I have learned about the digital humanities in the West from the research Inaba has summarized.
2. The Visual-Textual
The first way that work described by Professor Inaba challenges our ideas about the digital humanities is the way it calls into question the primacy of the text. The digital humanities in the West tends to be focused on the digitization, editing, analysis, and representation of text. Our founding father was Father Busa who created the Index Thomisticus – a massive concordance. The early work in humanities computing was all concerned with texts and concordances. By contrast DH work here is visual. The Kachina cube tool is a good example. I believe this is due in part to the importance of intangible culture from Kabuki to Noh. There is no text to the intangible. It isn’t clear what you can digitize.
In the West we can learn from DH in Japan to digitize and think about the visual and intangible without thinking of it as an extended version of text. We need to question the primacy of text and how our traditions have influenced what we think the future is. The Web Technology Group is showing a different way forward. There is an extraordinary amount of imagination behind how these projects have been conceived. There is careful thought and barrier crossing that has gone into figuring out how to intervene with the digital in a way that is acceptable to practicioners of these traditions. You don’t see the delicate negotiations in the outcomes.
3. The Virtual-Ludic
The second thing I have learned from presentation and the Web Technologies group is the value of virtual modelling.
The virtual is an important way to model the humanities in digital form for research and reconstruction. For reasons that I don’t understand, after a lot of enthusiasm in the 1990s, virtual reality has fallen out of favor as a way of doing research in the West. Some of this may have to do with a feeling that we overinvested in Second Life or a concern that there aren’t standards for the long term preservation of 3D scholarly data. Perhaps the virtual also smells of computer games.
By contrast, here, many projects are using motion capture and virtual worlds to study intangible cultural traditions.
There is also a close connection between DH and game studies. In November Ritsumeikan inaugurated a Centre for Game Studies connected to the digital humanities. The same Web Technologies group is using the virtual to study traditional arts and to imagine the future of games.
One project not mentioned, that is happening here, is the study of games through Emulation as a form of preservation. This picture is of the only official Nintendo Famicom emulator in existence. It was developed by Nintendo for research here and is a unique resource. It is also an example of academy/industry boundary crossing. Emulators are an interesting form of the virtual for research. They recreate an intangible original.
Given the importance of videogames to popular culture here and in the West we can all learn from the Web Technologies Group’s approach to research with the virtual and of the ludic. Given how videogames are now a global industry it will be important to start coordinating our research globally so that it can cross cultures the way the games we study do.