heidelberg

The latest trends and future prospects of NACSIS-CAT/ILL and the E-resources Data Sharing Services.

The digital collections of the National Diet Library (NDL) are making a significant impact on the humanities and social sciences, both in terms of their extensive holdings and their powerful full-text search capabilities. This presentation introduces a novel methodological approach using large language models (LLMs) to analyze full-text data of modern Japanese novels provided by the NDL.

Since 1997, Historiographical Institute the University of Tokyo Old Photographs Research Project has been conducting research and preservation activities on collections of old photographs scattered around Japan and abroad whose provenance and transmission are certain and has also been collecting high-resolution digital image data. In some of these cases, the value of old photographs as historical materials has been reaffirmed, and after the survey, they were designated as national important cultural properties. Since 2003, the company has also continued to conduct surveys in cooperation with foreign institutions.

This presentation explores how the Digital Literary Map of Japan (DLM, https://literarymaps.nijl.ac.jp) can be applied to the education and research of classical Japanese literature, with a particular focus on nō drama. As a distinctive form of Japanese theatrical culture, nō frequently features historical landmarks and poetic place names (utamakura) in its poetic texts. These references often play a significant role in constructing the symbolic meanings of the works. Understanding the historical and cultural background, as well as the inherited and innovative literary imagery of these locations, is therefore essential for a deeper appreciation of nō.

For the past four years, we have employed the "Digital Literary Map of Japan" (hereafter referred to as DLM, https://literarymaps.nijl.ac.jp) as a teaching resource in joint courses on Japanese literature and theatre, as well as in international collaborative courses between Osaka University and Heidelberg University. The DLM not only facilitates spatial recognition of utamakura (poetic place-names) through mapping, but also functions as a database that provides geographical and historical explanations for over 100 famous sites and utamakura, along with example usages and visual materials.

Minna de Honkoku (https://honkoku.org/) is a crowdsourcing platform for the transcription of historical Japanese documents, such as manuscripts and printed books produced before the Meiji era. This presentation introduces the platform along with associated tools, research applications, and educational practices.

Research into the application of generative AI is underway in the humanities as well. The International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) has been converting the 67,000 pages of the Kojiruien, an encyclopedia of Japanese culture compiled at the beginning of the 20th century, into text data, which it has been releasing sequentially since 2008. As of May 2025, 22,477 pages are available as searchable text data.

Prominent businessman and social entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931) was active across a wide range of fields from the late Edo period through the early Showa era. Throughout his life, he adhered to Rongo (the Analects of Confucius) as a personal and ethical guide. His philosophy of integrating morality with economic activity is clearly articulated in his 1916 collection of lectures, Rongo to Soroban (The Analects and the Abacus, Tōadō-shobō), a work that remains widely read today through various translations.

The Slovene Ethnographic Museum holds a total of 105 pieces of Japanese art brought back by Dr. Franc Kos, the ambassador of the then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to Japan from 1959 to 1962. Though there is a record of exhibitions of the Kos collection in the 1960s, other than a short introduction to the history of Japanese art by the curator at the time, there is no record of analysis or explanation of individual items in the collection. Currently, only 26 items from this collection, including paintings, calligraphy, and picture scrolls, are introduced on the Museum's Internet site, but there are other items that have not yet been analyzed or described.

Kyo-u Library, Takeda Science Foundation, located in Doshomachi, Osaka, a town that has developed as a pharmaceutical town since the 1720s, is Japan's largest repository of old medical books and documents. The collection, which began as a private collection started by Mr. Takeda after the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), has a history of about one hundred years and includes three national treasures and fourteen important cultural properties. The collection contains mainly Japanese and Chinese books on medicine and herbalism including Western studies documents and Dunhuang document and continues to expand to this day.