EAJRS Conference 2011 Roundup
It's been a month allready, but here is my roundup of this year's EAJRS conference in Newcastle.
Not surprisingly four of the presentations centered around the Tōhoku disaster. Starting with NDL, giving an overview of the library damage in that region (251 libraries, 236 musea and 128 lifelong learning centres wrecked or damaged).
The National Diet Library building in Tokyo itself didn't suffer much damage, and only on the top 4 of their 17 floors where 1.8 mio books dropped of their shelves. On March 12 they counted 318 visitors (wonder what they came to read), everything was back to normal by 25/4. More importantly, we also got an idea about what NDL is doing in terms of support measures:
- restoration and conservation of damaged materials (with the Noda village library as an example)
- archiving eartquake related web resources, in cooperation with the Internet Archive and the Reischauer institute
- contributing to Diet debates, reports (follow the digital booklibrary link on their homepage)
Follow the links on their support page or take a look at the presentation.
JACAR, one of the best Japanese Studies resources around, features an online guide to tsunami and earthquake related historical documents. Check out the top left button on their Japanese homepage or the presentation titled
"Earthquakes and Resilience as Seen in Official Documents from Meiji, Taisho, Showa Eras".
Yuriko Kadokura from the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation looked at natural disasters as recorded in shashi (company histories) while the fourth contribution covering the Tōhoku theme transformed itself overnight into a talk about gaisho at Nichibunken, which turned out to be quite interesting (gaisho are books relating to japan written in foreign languages btw.). I'll be sure to take a closer look when (and if) I get to Japan next spring.
Lots of talks about wahon (premodern japanese books) as well, not in the least in the keynote: Kōnosuke Hashiguchi gave an enjoyable talk about the Edo-period publishing scene, providing some insight in the closed word of the Jinbōchō antiquarian book market at the same time. The presentation is a ready-made learning resource, listing technical terms (kinds of binding, publisher-related tems etc.) in Japanese with the equivalent in English.
The first contribution in the 'Digitizing Japanese Resources' session on Thursday came with some cognitive callisthenics. The audience was required to somehow visualize a database interface, as the speaker stated "being unable to use a powerpoint presentation". The buzzword digital humanities was mentioned for the first time in an EAJRS conference, during the update talk on the ARC digitization model (Ritsumeikan Uni.) To conclude the session: more wahon, specifically the digitizing of wahon in the HUMI project (Keio Uni.) with lots of attention for the technical and design aspects of bookcradles.
These fine talks will most likely find their way to this semester's 'Introduction to Japanese Culture' course as background materials:
- Ellis Tinios' account of publishers tricks in the Edo period (still hoping to get my hands on the ppt/pdf)
- Researching Shunga: Accessing Private Collections, Andrew Gerstle advocating more shunga research
- The only contribution mentioning, using and actually being all about open source: Mapping Buddhist Monasteries(presentation by Ian Astley)
- Introduction to the Japanese artefacts in the Edinburgh collection (Rosina Buckland)
- Magic lantern slides, cinema's precursor: All about the “Magic”: Looking Through Takie Okumura's Magic Lantern Slides. (Tokiko Bazzell - Uni. of Hawai)
- Donatella Faila's history of iron and bronze casters during the Edo period was one of the highlights of this conference
Let's finish with the announcement of a new service from the NII: CiNii books. It will be released coming November and is the replacement for Webcat Plus, which will be closed in two years.
I am looking forward to next year's gathering in Berlin.
