Mobility and Materiality of Manuscripts – Towards a Multi-disciplinary Study and Creating Digital Archive of Manuscripts in the Nakanishi Collection

Keywords

Digital Humanities、Codicology、Cultural Heritage Preservation

Objectives

The National Museum of Japanese History’s Nakanishi Collection is a collection of works that include printed material, manuscripts, and craftwork that contains writings in 95 different languages from around the world. The aim of this research project is to carefully investigate the academic value of materials classified as manuscripts in the collection, and organize and publicly release them to be used as research resources by researchers around the world.
Several manuscripts with outstanding academic and artistic value have been found in the Nakanishi Collection in previous studies. In this research project, experts in a wide range of fields including literature, linguistics, history, and religious studies will shed light on the academic value of the Nakanishi Collection manuscripts (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and Geʽez) from a multifaceted perspective, with the aim of building a digital archive to pass down and utilize the manuscripts. One example of their academic use is interdisciplinary research that focuses on the mobility and materiality of manuscripts.