（様式）FY2019 Annual Report for International Joint Research with Research FundInternational Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC),Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University
Date (year/mm/dd):

2020/04/17

1. Title of the Research Project

Providing descriptive metadata and transcriptions for Collection of correspondence and poems from various
officials from the Kumamoto domain
2. Research Leader
NameOrganization and title

Mieko MAZZA

East Asia Library, Stanford University

3. Co-researcher (Total： 0persons)

4. Overview of the Research Project (About 150 words) Note: If you have changed your project since the time ofapplication submission, please write clearly where you made changes.

Stanford University East Asia Library holds “Kumamoto-han bunjin shojoshu” (Collection of correspondence
and poems from various officials from the Kumamoto domain) which is a collection consisting of 31 separate
sheets with letters and poems affixed on them. Currently, this collection’s metadata consists of minimum
information provided by the dealer. This manuscript collection is in characters written in the cursive style andis very difficult to read by a non-specialist. By using the ARC’s Kuzushiji AI database, I hope to provide
transcriptive metadata to this collection that allows me to identify senders/receivers of letters and contents sothat I could add subject matter to each manuscript in order to enhance discoverability of this collection. I hope
to use this collection as a pilot project for future planning of manuscript transcription projects utilizing AI
databases such as this.
5. Overview of the Research Results Note: We may use this section for the Center’s PR.

As this research project request had been submitted in mid-January 2020 (1), the time I was able to spend on
this research prior to the March 2020 deadline was less than a month. Due to this time constraint (2), I was
not able to archive the initial goal, which was the transcription of all manuscripts in the collection. I plan toapply for the renewal of the project with ARC. During the research of the collection, I made some interesting
discoveries as follows:
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Out of 100 manuscripts, 17 items are Kanshi poems.
Out of 83 letters, 27 letters were addressed to UNO Kihachiro.
Vendor-provided sender information needs to be thoroughly verified (some of the vendor-provided
sender information turned out to be incorrect. example: eal0014_07_01).
AI database transcription pages and image pages both load very quickly and are very easy to use.
The AI transcription assistance results are better for those manuscripts with printed style writing
than cursive writing style.

If my application for the 2020 project is approved, I plan to double my efforts to provide full transcription ofthis collection. I also plan to contact local historians from Kumamoto City to help me understand the subject
matters mentioned in the letters. I am optimistic to achieve these goals by March 2021 based on the progress
I made during this year’s short research period.

（様式）(1) I would like to express my deep gratitude to Assistnt Professor KANEKO Takaaki, Art Research Center,Ritsumeikan University for his technical assistance. Advice given by Dr. Regan Murphy Kao (Curator forJapanese Collections/Head of Special Collections, East Asia Library, Stanford University) on digitization
projects has been a great help. I am particularly grateful for the technical support given by Ms. Yumi Igarashi(Special Collection’s Assistant, East Asia Library, Stanford University), who painstakingly scanned each itemand manipulated the image quality using Photoshop software for uploading to the ARC database.
(2) Due to Santa Clara County’s COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, Stanford University Library closed on
March 10, 2020.
6. Research Activities（１） Books（２） Articles（３） Presentations（４）Symposiums and/or research meeting you organized（５）Other research activities (Lectures to the general public, and appearances in/contributions to mass media)（６）Academic award（７）Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research -KAKENHI（８）Competitive grants other than KAKENHI（９）Other achievements