Election for sc SIG:East Asian

This time, 3 members were nominated for the steering committee of SIG:East Asian/Japanese. If you are a member of TEI-C, please vote from the election form or by sending e-mail to nagasaki_at_dhii.jp with a subject "TEI-EAJ voting".

Satoru Nakamura

Satoru Nakamura, Ph.D, is an assistant professor at the department of Information Technology Center of the University of Tokyo. His main research interest is development and  utilization  of  digital  archives. He is promoting the  development  of  digital  archives  of  academic  research  resources  and  conducting  research  on  methodologies  related  to  the  creation,  preservation,  and  provision  of  the  data  in  those  archives. Especially, he played a central role in the digitization and disclosure of the technical documents left by Yuzuru Hiraga who was the president of Tokyo Imperial University and the vice-admiral in the shipbuilding division of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In addition, he is currently engaged in developing digital archives of various materials of the University of Tokyo Library. He also  aims  to  contribute  to  the  creation  of  new  knowledge in humanities  research by  utilizing  digital  archives  and  information  technology, such as Linked Data, Ontology, IIIF and TEI.

Relation and Interest to TEI-EAJ I am an information technology researcher working in a library. I am not specializing in humanities, therefore I would like to contribute to the dissemination of TEI by non humanities researchers or data providing organizations such as libraries as the formulation of guidelines “Best Practices for TEI in Libraries”. In order to achieve this goal, I am considering the following two efforts. One is, as a kind of librarian, to promote the sharing of case studies through the practice of TEI in the libraries. Currently, I am promoting accumulation and disclosure of TEI Data using the TAPAS Project at Tokyo University Library. By showing practices of introduction of TEI, it contributes to the diffusion of TEI in Japan. This may include revision of guidelines that conform to Japanese environment including translation. Second is, as an information technology researcher, to promote the use case of TEI. One of the advantages of TEI is the diverse utilization of structured data. However, it may be hard for users who are not familiar with TEI to understand the advantages. Therefore, I would like to show TEI use cases through the development of applications for such as analysis and visualization with humanities researchers. This can contribute to the sharing of the benefits of TEI.

Kazuhiro Okada

Dr Kazuhiro Okada is a Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at Center for Collaborative Research in Pre-modern Japanese Texts, National Institute of Japanese Literature, National Institutes for Humanities, Japan. He is specialised in Japanese linguistics with special attention to palaeography and philology, which lead him to an interest in digital humanities. He was awarded a PhD degree in Japanese Linguistics in 2015 from Hokkaido University, Japan, where he explored the awareness in graphemic standard of hiragana around 1900, when hiragana was standardised to the modern shape. In his exploration, he attempted to draw insights not only from traditional inspection, but also from statistic findings based on digital texts. His current position seeks digital humanistic validity and advances in the use and development of digital libraries within the nationally prioritised funded project, ‘Project to Build an International Collaborative Research Network for Pre-modern Japanese Texts’ (NIJL-NW Project). Especially, he has been involved to one of the core of the project, ‘The Database of Pre-modern Japanese Texts’, in which hundreds of thousands of images of pre-modern Japanese texts would finally be provided. He is currently interesting in offering philological materials related to the project in conformance with TEI.

Relation and Interest to TEI-EAJ As a member of the NIJL-NW Project, my main focus in TEI encoding concerning the matter of encoding of Japanese text lies especially in pre-modern materials. Specifically, as I described earlier, providing TEI-conformant texts in the digital library project includes precise rendering of bibliographical records and that of body texts in adequate order. The success of TEI-EAJ will encourage the more projects to create texts of pre-modern East Asian materials in harmony with interoperability. From a personal perspective, I am interesting in the encoding of pre-modern allographs. Allography involves both palaeographic and philological matters: they always remind us of what (digital) text is. As usual, inclination to allography is discouraged. For example, the first section of Ch. 5 of TEI P5, ‘Characters, Glyphs, and Writing Modes’, entitled ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’, arguing differentiation of superficial differences results as a rule excessive rendering. At the same time, adequate allograph encoding makes philological endeavour more and more clear. Especially in East Asian materials, where numbers of allograph inventories easily go innumerable, allograph rendering often reveals lines of errors in copying. In other words, it directly contributes to the understanding of textual tradition. My personal goal in commitment to TEI-EAJ includes pursuit of balanced encoding of such allography.

Kiyonori Nagasaki

Kiyonori Nagasaki, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Digital Humanities in Tokyo. His main research interest is in the development of digital frameworks for collaboration in Buddhist studies. He is also engaging in investigation into the significance of digital methodology in Humanities and in promotion of DH activities in Japan. He has taught DH including TEI in several courses in the University of Tokyo and University of Tsukuba. He has been publishing monthly e-newsletter on DH since 2011 as the general editor. He has been participating in a number of Digital Humanities projects conducted at several institutions in Japan and abroad such as the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Osaka University, the National Diet Library, the National Museum of Ethnology, the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics, the University of Tsukuba and the University of Hamburg. His activities also include postgraduate education in DH at the University of Tokyo as well as administrative tasks at several scholarly societies including the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities and the Japanese Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies.

Relation and Interest to TEI-EAJ As a founding member of this SIG, I've been engaging in dissemination and application of TEI among not only Japanese texts but also researchers and research activities among Japanese researchers since over a decade ago. Recently I've addressing to adopt IIIF in order to pursue possibilities of linking TEI encoded texts with hi-resolution images on Web by developing several Web solutions.