A Note on Digital Humanities Research on the Reception of Matsuo Bashō in Modern Japan ：Crossing Borders between Human Reading and Machine Reading

Abstract

In this essay, I provided a brief report and perspective on digital humanities research related to the study of modern Japanese literature. First, I reviewed the recent increase in the availability of digital full-text databases, including Aozora Bunko, the National Diet Library’s Next Digital Library, Maruzen eBook Library, and Google Books. Next, as an example of digital humanities-based literary studies using the Next Digital Library, I attempted to study the reception of Matsuo Bashō between 1868 and 1945. Specifically, I searched the Next Digital Library—which currently has about 280,000 modern books available for full-text search—for Bashō’s <i>haiku</i> and found over a thousand works by him, although the total number differs depending on the counting method. I researched the <i>haikus</i> individually for the full-text data in books published between 1868 and 1945, using the computer language Python to automate the search and retrieve the results. Consequently, the top 30 most frequently cited works were identified. For the top five, the number of mentions by year of publication was also investigated. Results between the human- and computer-based reception studies were compared, and the strengths and weaknesses in understanding the context were highlighted. As for future prospects, I discussed the importance of human-computer collaboration, the necessity for combining large-scale full-text data sets with other databases, and the possibilities for structuring text using TEI and other methods.