歴史地震史料の全文データベース化

Abstract

Almost all of Japan’s known historical earthquake records since around the 6th century, which are clippings from various historical sources, have been published in type-printed books of 31 volumes. They are invaluable primary data for the Japanese historical seismology, although buried historical materials should further be searched for and added. There are, however, two serious problems in these books. One is that they contain rather many unreliable materials because the compilers did not carry out any critical examination of historical sources nor selection, which tends to produce errors in historical earthquake study. The other is that the books are just a huge amount of printed papers, which makes full-scale utilization of massive information including keyword searching impossible. In order to improve these situations fundamentally, it is very important to construct a full-text digital database of all historical earthquake documents after critically examining them, carefully emending every text, and composing a re-edited collection in digital form. Recently, such a database, Online Database of Historical Documents on Japanese Earthquakes and Eruptions in the Ancient and Medieval Ages, has been established through an interdisciplinary collaboration among earth scientists, historians and information scientists under the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). Although its period is restricted for the ancient and medieval ages (up to ca. A.D. 1600), it will be able to be expanded to the early modern age because its basic design is systematic and solid. However, the construction of a reliable full-text database of historical documents on the Japanese early modern earthquakes is considered to require a long-term and wide-scale national project because the amount of documents to be examined and processed is extremely huge.