A Study of Distant Viewing of ukiyo-e prints

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5879–5888 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5879 A Study of Distant Viewing of Ukiyo-e Prints Konstantina Liagkou, John Pavlopoulos, Ewa Machotka Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece Stockholm University, Sweden konstantinalia4@gmail.com {ioannis, ewa.machotka}@su.se Abstract This paper contributes to studying relationships between Japanese topography and places featured in early modern landscape prints, so-called ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the floating world’. The printed inscriptions on these images feature diverse place-names, both man-made and natural formations. However, due to the corpus’s richness and diversity, the precise nature of artistic mediation of the depicted places remains little understood. In this paper, we explored a new analytical approach based on the macroanalysis of images facilitated by Natural Language Processing technologies. This paper presents a small dataset with inscriptions on prints that have been annotated by an art historian for included place-name entities. By fine-tuning and applying a Japanese BERT-based Name Entity Recogniser, we provide a use-case of a macroanalysis of a visual dataset that is hosted by the digital database of the Art Research Center at the Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Our work studies the relationship between topography and its visual renderings in early modern Japanese ukiyo-e landscape prints, demonstrating how an art historian’s work can be improved with Natural Language Processing toward distant viewing of visual datasets. We release our dataset and code for public use: https://github.com/connalia/ukiyo-e_meisho_nlp. Keywords: Name Entity Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Digital Humanities 1. Introduction The recognition of the potential of computational tools and approaches for the study of cultural heritage has been growing in the last decades in different academic disciplines including art history. The advancing dig- itization of artefacts and growing digital databases as well as the emergence of Open Access principles facil- itate and boost these developments worldwide. How- ever, scholars emphasise that the digital research of visual arts must be informed by professional art his- torical knowledge that acknowledges the situatedness of knowledge production (Bentkowska-Kafel, 2015). Paul Jascot (Jaskot, 2019) poses the question: “(...) what are the critical questions in art history that de- mand and are best suited to specific digital methods?” Taking this position as a conceptual point of depar- ture for our research, our project combines ‘distant viewing’ (Arnold and Tilton, 2019) or macroanalysis of visual materials, and ‘close reading’ of the arte- facts through formal and contextual analysis (Gold and Klein, 2019) to study Japanese early modern wood- block prints, so-called ukiyo-e or ‘pictures of the float- ing world’ produced between the seventeenth and mid- nineteenth century. These prints rooted in early modern culture of entertainment also include landscape images, which rose to popularity in the first half of the nine- teenth century and still attract wide attention world- wide as evidenced by the global career (Guth, 2016) of “The Great Wave” (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura, ca. 1830) designed by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Understood as representations of physical reality, cer- tain places and topography …

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