The Evolution of Projects and the Importance of Reassessment

At the Digital Orientalist we tend to review a lot of projects, tools and databases, but when we do so we look at those things in a state of stasis. We take a snapshot of the subject of our reviews at a given time, but we rarely offer a reassessment at a later date even if our use of those projects have changed or the projects themselves have been further developed. Take my review of Japan Search, for example, as the title subtle “Much ado about nothing” suggests I was less than enthralled by the platform, but little more than a year after publishing the review I’m now using it several times a week and it forms an important part of my research and teaching. Inspired by recent conversations with a colleague, in this contribution I want to return to some of the projects I’ve looked at in the past and offer some reassessments – what has happened since I wrote my initial review and how has my usage and assessment evolved.

Let’s start with the aforementioned Japan Search. When I wrote my review of the platform my grievances were two-fold – firstly it is too large and unwieldly, and secondly the search parameters are insufficient to narrow results. These facets haven’t really changed, but my purposes and approach have. One way to deal with the huge amount of information and search results on Japan Search is to use the platform’s galleries function. This can be a great way to quickly see what holdings exist on a particular topic and begin to access them. Take this gallery on Kirishitan daimyō, for example, we are presented with a short introduction, can see related topics, and quickly access relevant books, artefacts, and videos. By using galleries one can easily reduce some of the overwhelming amount of results that one receives with a normal search. The primary way that I’ve been using the platform, however, is to find IIIF manifests for use in my current research project represented on the website Kirishitan Bank and within my teaching. I’ve found that the platform is an excellent resource for finding IIIFs and although this may sometimes still produce a large number of search results, I’ve find that the nature of a given project may help to whittle these down further with very little effort. Reassessing Japan Search, I would say that whilst I still find the large amount of data difficult to search, the platform does offer ways to deal with this and it provides a great resource (as I stated in the review) to find certain types of data such as images or IIIFs.

Screenshot of the Kirishitan daimyō gallery.

In April 2021, I wrote about the small number of digitized resources relating the Ashio Copper Mine Incident. Therein I noted the collections held by The National Diet Library Digital Collections, a platform that many of those engaged in Japanese studies regularly use, and which has also featured in other contributions that I have made to the Digital Orientalist. Whilst the number of resources accessible on the platform haven’t radically changed, the NDL’s Digital Collections have recently been revamped. It is now possible to search for keywords within texts. This is an extremely powerful research tool that I have been employing to quickly locate potentially relevant passages. For a forthcoming paper on the history of the Ashio Copper Mine, I employed this new search functionality to locate passages related to food and eating practices at the mines. This helped to increase workflow and also allowed me to discover some useful early sources about the mines that I was previously unaware of. Combining this search functionality with the NDL’s Next Digital Library, which contains some 350,000 searchable texts, can also increase workflow. The texts included in Next Digital Library are fully transcribed and these transcriptions can be copy-pasted elsewhere. As I wrote the aforementioned paper, I found that it was often quicker to copy and paste lengthy quotes from Next Digital Library than to transcribe them by hand. It must be noted, however, that since both the Next Digital Library and the Digital Collections rely on OCR technology the transcriptions often require some correction. This also means, I imagine, that some relevant results may not appear in one’s search. In any case, there is no overarching reassessment of the NDL’s Digital Collections to be made here – the platform remains a key tool for any historian of Japan. The added functionality, however, makes it potentially a real game changer.

Searching a text in the Next Digital Library.

Copying a transcription from the Next Digital Library.

Next, I would like to turn to the Database of Research on the Imjin War. I wrote about this platform shortly after its launch in 2020 and was quite excited about the platform praising its appearance, functionality and features. I still stand-by these assessments. At the time of my review I was concerned with the modest size of the database which at the time of writing only contained 361 entries. I am thrilled to see that the database has grown with 780 entries existing on the platform by September 2022. Despite this growth and as my language may be suggesting, I have not remained an active user. I imagine that there may have been some overestimation on my part about the number of relevant entries the database may include relating to my own research or it may be linked to the fact that Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea remain little more than a side note in my own work. Returning to the platform, I notice that few of the new entries pertain to my own research interests. None of this is meant to reflect poorly on the Database of Research on the Imjin War, rather it highlights a point that was made at the beginning of this article – my purposes and approaches have changed. I still receive regular updates about the project as I am a member of the mailing list and I would very much like to attend some of its ongoing webinars when I can find the time.

There are many other projects that I have reviewed which I could turn to in an article like this, but reassessing statements that I’ve made in the past is only part of the aim of this contribution. It is important to recognize that our use of different platforms, tools, and databases is very much shaped by our ongoing research and teaching, and that the relevance or utility of a particular platform will change over time. However, in a field that is often focused on new outputs we are liable to overlook potentially useful resources that already exist and changes to them that increase their functionality and utility. I would like to end with a recommendation for the reader – when you have a spare moment return to some resources that you’ve used in the past, but which you are no longer actively engaged with – you may find some surprises!