corr: asking your inputs about the Bunkacho project, the National Center for Media Arts

[Hideaki Fujiki]

The Bunkacho will hold a hearing about the Center on Wednesday and  
Friday. Everyone can audit it with advance registration. Information  
is available here: http://www.bunka.go.jp/oshirase_kaigi/2009/ 
kokurithumedeia_2.html. I will give a ten-minute talk on Friday.

Hideaki






On 2009/06/19, at 4:09, Bruce Baird wrote:

> All,
>
> I realize that many people have already weighed in on this issue,  
> and Fujiki-san himself has already replied to this list and may  
> already have written his editorial, but I've been thinking about  
> my  experiences at the Keio University Research Center for the Arts  
> and Arts Administration (including the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive  
> I've been utilizing).  In the late 90's, they got a bucket load of  
> money from monbusho to explore digital archiving and while they  
> have been quite hampered by the problem of copyright (some subjects  
> of their main collections of materials--Takiguchi, Noguchi Isamu,  
> and Hijikata are only recently passed on), in principle the kinds  
> of strategies have been pretty interesting and helpful.  Taking a  
> hint from the searchability of Finnigans Wake for Joyce scholars,  
> they have goal of making all of someone's corpus of materials  
> searchable, so for example, while you wouldn't want to get a  
> Hijikata hit while searching for 'dog' in a library database, it  
> would be meaningful to be able to search for everytime Hijikata  
> used the word dog in all his essays, writings, notebooks, and etc,  
> in the same way that you might want to search across the entire  
> Joyce corpus for "brown mackintosh" or something like that.  At the  
> present, you can't actually perform a search from outside the  
> archive, and I am sure that has to do with both copyright and also  
> probably Keio incentivizing the archive to earn some money in this  
> day of uncertain funding for universities.  However, along with  
> viewing capabilities in situ, digitalization and off-sight  
> searchability and accessibility should be part of the equation.
>
> Also, in a kind of parallel manner in the way that many museums now  
> tread lightly with restorations of art works because the history an  
> art work passed through is its own valuable story and not just the  
> original art work itself, they have had the meta goal of  
> incorporating into the archive the very work that people do on  
> these corpuses so the 'self awareness' of the archive is  
> increasing.  The goal, however imperfectly realized, has been both  
> to provide researchers with the tools to pursue any kind of  
> research they like (through the above searchability), and at the  
> same time, to understand and track what people are searching and  
> what key words are important as a way of possibly stimulating more  
> research.    I suggest that Fujiki-san spend an afternoon at the  
> Mita campus visiting with the archivists there to get hints for how  
> the media center might function.
>
> In addition, I think video games and all generations of gaming  
> consoles should be available.  Video games are too much a part of  
> this to ignore in favor of anime and manga as can be seen most  
> obviously from the Pokemon and Final Fantasy franchises.
>
> Best,
>
> Bruce
>
>
> Bruce Baird
> Assistant Professor
> Asian Languages and Literatures
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
> Butô, Japanese Theater, Intellectual History
>
> 717 Herter Hall
> 161 Presidents Drive
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
> Amherst, MA 01003-9312
> Phone: 413-577-4992
> Fax: 413-545-4975
> baird at asianlan.umass.edu
>
>
>
>