Outline of collaborative research
The Art Research Center (ARC) at Ritsumeikan University is a leading force in digital archiving, specializing in Japanese cultural heritage. Known for its expertise in digitization, ARC makes a vast number of images and objects―including over 700,000 paintings and ukiyo-e prints and nearly 400,000 Edo period books―globally accessible through its online databases. This is made possible through collaborations with tens of institutions around the world, including the British Museum, the Wereldmuseum Leiden (National Museum of Ethnology), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and University of California, Berkeley, to name but a few.
This new, ambitious initiative aims to expand the ARC’s digital research space into an online “research world” that attracts researchers from around the world into an online ecosystem of digitized materials, digital tools, scholarly outputs, and educational activity, with the long-term goal of establishing a global consortium focused on preserving and researching Japanese cultural materials and promoting digital methods for doing so.
Papers, etc.
Conference presentation
- "What we have been endeavoring to do in the ARC's Digital Archives, and what is ahead for the Digital Humanities" (Art Research Center 25th Anniversary International Symposium: Liberal Arts Innovation in Digital Humanities and Digital Archives--Exploring Further Possibilities, September 30, 2023, Ritsumeikan University)
Symposia, seminars, etc.
International joint colloquium
- Theory and Methods in the Japanese Humanities: Research Using Visual Sources and Archives (September 15, 2023, University of California, Berkeley)
International seminar
- "The ARC Research Space: Aiming at Perfecting a Comprehensive Digital Research Space" (February 20, 2024, SOAS, University of London)
Future prospects/aspiration
Building upon the Art Research Center’s already extensive network of partnerships across North America, Europe, and elsewhere, our project plans to solidify and expand those relationships into a global consortium. Adding the collaboration of the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities and Japan Past & Present project based at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Center has laid the groundwork for collaboration with roughly fifty universities and another fifty libraries, museums, and other institutions across North America and Europe, including the University of British Columbia, Heidelberg University, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Zurich, Leiden University, and others.
