DIGITAL LITERATURE: Computers Revolutionize Research of Japanese Classics December 14, 2001 The phrase "studying the literary classics" tends to evoke images of scholars poring over musty texts and analyzing them line by line. These days, however, a growing number of literary scholars are finding computers an invaluable aid to tasks such as determining word frequencies, comparing different literary works, and finding instances of the similar phrase in different works. The availability of literary works in digital form is revolutionizing the study of literary classics and is even leading to discoveries that are overturning established literary theories. Electronic Archives Boost Research When the subject of Japanese literary classics comes up, one of the first works that comes to mind is the Man'yoshu, the earliest Japanese poetry collection in existence. This collection consists of some 4,516 tanka (short poems) and other poems, written over a period of about 350 years until the middle of the eighth century. The National Institute of Japanese Literature http://www.nijl.ac.jp/e/ Genji Monogatari WWW Homepage http://www.nijl.ac.jp/personal/ito/ Japan Classic Literature Research Institute http://www.genji.co.jp/engindex.htm Prof. Eiichi Shibuya's Homepage http://www.takachiho.ac.jp/~eshibuya/ Japanese Text Initiative http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/index.html Another representative Japanese classic is Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji), which was written at the beginning of the eleventh century and is said to be the world's first novel. The work contains about 750,000 words in Japanese, and its English translation is over a thousand pages long. The body of classic Japanese literature, including these two works, is enormous. To read every classic work would be a herculean task. Even readers restricting themselves to only the most famous works would be occupied for years. The amount of energy required to not only read but study and compare these works has always been beyond the imaginings of most people. But now that computers are dramatically boosting the efficiency of the research process, that situation is changing. The first step in using computers as a research tool in the study of literature is creating an electronic archive--a database of literary classics. This archive allows researchers to perform a variety of tasks more efficiently (the more skilled the researcher, the greater the variety of tasks, and the greater their efficiency). Though digital tools for the study of Japanese classic literature are still in their infancy, several success stories have already emerged. Simplifying the Comparison of Poems One of these successes is the discovery that the Tametada-shu, a collection of poems generally believed to date from the Heian period (794-1185), was actually compiled about 400 years later, during the Muromachi period (1333-1568). This discovery was made by three young scholars--one specializing in information science, one in the study of the Japanese language, and one in Japanese literature--who created a computer program designed to search for poems that resemble one another in certain ways. By using their software to compare the 269 poems of the Tametada-shu with over 100,000 Japanese poems from 155 collections compiled at the end of or after the Heian period, these researchers determined that the Tametada-shu actually dates from the Muromachi period. As one of the researchers put it, "The computer dismantled an established notion."   Your Name What did you think of this article? It was interesting. It was boring. Send this article to a friend Another recent discovery facilitated by computers concerns the connection between Murasaki Shikibu, the author of Genji monogatari, and one of her contemporaries, Sei Shonagon, who wrote Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon). The two are known to have been rivals, but recently researchers aided by computer-based analysis tools found that their rivalry actually had its roots three generations before they lived, when Murasaki Shikibu's great-grandfather allegedly plagiarized a poem written by Sei Shonagon's great-grandfather. The researchers say they made their discovery using a method similar to the way that scientists determine genetic relationships from the similarity of genetic arrays. Another scholar used a computer to analyze the vocabulary in Genji monogatari and, based on the fact that the style of the section titled Uji jujo differed from the style of the rest of the work, came up with the theory that the work had multiple authors. As these examples show, the availability of the classics in digital form is bringing literary scholarship into an age of controversy. And while some fear that computer-based tools will cause people to neglect the diligent reading that is so crucial to studying the classics, many are hoping that the spread of these tools will spur a review of the entire body of literary knowledge. Copyright (c) 2001 Japan Information Network. Edited by Japan Echo Inc. based on domestic Japanese news sources. Articles presented here are offered for reference purposes and do not necessarily represent the policy or views of the Japanese Government.