Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities Vol. 2(2017) No. 1

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to discern if the samples of texts from different periods cluster together.

We found that PCA used on common grammatical particles that exhibit great variance between texts, but occur evenly distributed within the texts, does in this case indeed yield distinctive patterns that distinguish the translations from different time periods. This is relevant for historical Chinese linguistics and Buddhist studies. It allows us to identify grammatical particles the use of which differs between translations from different periods. This in turn is an important basis for further research into Buddhist Hybrid Chinese translation idioms and the better attribution and dating of Chinese Buddhist texts.

This paper proposes a method for describing narrative structure that focuses on the behavior of characters in a story. In this approach, focus, polarity, dynamic, motivation, and result are assigned as attributes of behavior. As a case study, the plots of flash fictions by Shin'ichi Hoshi were analyzed and represented formally using such behavioral attributes. Specifically, this approach to plot description enabled the representation of “punch lines,” which comprise a reversal of story elements (such as agent and recipient). Using software to analyze plot descriptions, certain types of reversal-type punch lines were automatically extracted. These extracted reversal patterns were sorted based on the rules of “similarity” and “distant foreshadowing,” and valid reversal-type punch lines were extracted in 60% of the analyzed stories.

This paper aims to demonstrate that variables relating to the independency of the string parts are useful for discriminating between symphonies and string quartets in terms of their orchestrations. More specifically, this paper targets the fast initial movements of thirty-nine symphonies and twenty string quartets by Mozart. Conducted analysis extracted three factors within the twelve observed variables and suggests that one of those factors, namely, the Lower part Pitch-Name and Duration factor (LPND), can account for the differences between Mozart’s symphonies and string quartets composed after 1782.

The present paper aims at designing a monitoring framework for a yet new interdisciplinary research and education program in Japan, “Cultural Resources Studies.”, "Bunkashigengaku" in Japanese. We analyze the linkage between a university, an academic association, and the practitioners’ institutions closely related with cultural resources through the mining of the principal texts produced by them. Our findings reveal the complicated relations among these stakeholder institutions, and attest to the importance of the revision cycle for the advance of interdisciplinary studies.

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia was launched in January 2001, and its articles now represent a major resource for understanding the world. Many of these articles have been negotiated and edited for a decade or more, and the history of that editing can provide insight into the recent history of ideas. This paper describes the development of a tool called WIScker that works with the Wikipedia Application Programming Interface (API) to scrape, or "wisck," the revision history of any Wikipedia article, in order to build a corpus for subsequent text analysis and visualization. As an example, we examine a fourteen-year revision history of the article "Terrorism," first introduced into Wikipedia in October 2001, the month after 9/11, and subsequently expanded to provide a more historically informed, though still politically motivated, entry.

Popular songs can be regarded as a fine representation of modern society andculture. In particular, the lyrics of popular songs are the most importantaspect for understanding the sense of values and linguistic sensitivity in agiven generation and community. The purpose of the present study is toinvestigate the chronological variation of popular Japanese songs usingstylometric techniques. This study draws on the lyrics of 858 songs, whichappeared on the Oricon annual top 20 single hit chart between 1976 and 2015. Thelinguistic features investigated in this study include five different types oflexical indices, namely (a) number of words, (b) parts-of-speech, (c) wordtypes, (d) character types, and (e) vocabulary level. Multiple regressionanalysis was conducted to explore the chronological change in the frequencies oflexical indices. The results showed that the frequencies of word types andcharacter types dramatically changed before and after 1990. Moreover, the usagesof auxiliary verbs as well as lower level vocabulary became more prominent,whereas the frequencies of adjectival nouns and conjunctions decreased. Thefindings suggest that a turning point in cultural trends corresponds with thehistorically significant political and economic events, such as the end of theShowa era and the burst of the bubble economy.