データのアーカイブ化とアジア研究

抄録

The author organized international symposium titled “Development of Data Archive and Its Impact on Asian Studies” at the annual meetings of Japan Association for Asian Studies on 25^th of June, 2017, which was financially supported by Kashiyama Foundation. In this symposium, four professors were invited as a guest speaker: they were Profs. Seokho Kim from Seoul National University (South Korea), Weidong Wang from Renmin University of China (China), Ronald Holmes from De La Salle University (Philippines), and Prof. Ryozo Yoshino from Institute of Statistical Mathematics (Japan), all of whom have been promoting projects on national data archive in their home countries.

Two discussants were also invited from the association: they were Profs. Akihiko Tanaka from National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies and Nobuto Yamamoto from Keio University, who have their own views toward data archival projects in Asia.

Its transcript of discussion record is already open to the public on association’s official website, but its main arguments were not systematically analyzed.

After the symposium, the author had two other opportunities to organize similar international symposia, in which researchers on Asian studies who have been collecting chronological data exchanged information about their experiences and opinions. This paper will provide with information of research trends on extensive quantitative survey projects based on the arguments in the above mentioned three symposia.

Data archival projects in Asia started in 1980s, but they entered into a new stage since 2000s when ICT changed the situation dramatically. More concretely, Asian studies have started to develop new research areas (1) with solid empirical support by extensive data (2) through their linkage with policy-makers as well as (3) other types of available data, while they have come to face some difficulties and challenges including (4) securing privacy of informants, (5) lack of enough resources to develop / maintain data archive continuously, and (6) guarantee of comparability of data across countries.

Asian studies in different age have different missions and approaches, depending on how much data are available. It will be a more and more important question whether “foreign” researchers can contribute to the understanding of the researched countries in Asia which are creating their own data archive. Of course answers for this question must be diversified among researchers. Increasing importance of data archival projects is thus shedding light on the importance of exchanging ideas among Asian study researchers in and out of Asia.