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

[Bruce Baird]

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




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