Building a multimedia haiku dictionary

Building a multimedia haiku dictionary

Christine
Ruotolo

Electronic Text Center
University of Virginia Library
cjr2q@virginia.edu

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Over the past year, the University of Virginia Library's Japanese Text Initiative
(JTI), in partnership with the Electronic Text Center (Etext), has been
developing an online multimedia dictionary of haiku. In this paper, I will
describe the scope and content of the project, and how it combines text and
multimedia materials in unique ways. I will also discuss the project from a
technical perspective, describing its encoding, interface, and search and
delivery mechanisms, with an emphasis on new problems encountered in the course
of development.
Haiku is a well-known and increasingly ubiquitous poetic form in the West and
around the world. But while many non-Japanese are familiar with the metrical
structure of haiku poetry, few have a sophisticated knowledge of its traditional
themes, which are based upon deeply nuanced kidai and kigo (season-words). At
the heart of the JTI project is an English translation of portions of the Nyumon
Saijiki, a standard reference of kidai and kigo produced by the Museum of Haiku
Literature in Tokyo. The Nyumon Saijiki contains entries for the people, places,
and things found in haiku, with examples of modern and classical haiku under
each entry. Our translation of this work, completed by world-renowned haiku
expert William Higginson, consists of kanji, hiragana, romaji, and English
renderings for each of the 3,000 kidai and kigo, along with a definition and
brief explication. For the 100 most important terms, Mr. Higginson has
translated the full entry, which includes a discussion of proper usage and
several example poems. In addition, we have supplemented these full entries with
image and sound files harvested from online archives. Audio and visual
illustrations of these recurrent themes (the cries of autumnal insects, the hazy
moon of a spring night, and so forth) will greatly enhance the user's
understanding of poetry that is so deeply rooted in sensory perceptions of
nature; this is doubly true for Western audiences who live half a world away
from the particular plants, animals, rituals, and seasonal phenomena discussed
in the poems.
Although Etext has produced and maintained full-text SGML/XML collections for
over a decade, and the JTI's work with Japanese language materials dates back to
1997, the current project has presented us with many new challenges. In the
past, the use of images in our collections was limited primarily to page images
and book illustrations; sound files were all but non-existent. The project's web
designer has strived to integrate the multimedia components into the project in
a way that supplements but does not overwhelm the textual content. The potential
audience for this project is incredibly broad; we anticipate that it will be
used around the world by everyone from grade-school students to professional
scholars of Japanese literature. Different users will require different views of
the data and different tools for manipulating it. A K-12 audience might want to
see just the English translations of the poems, accompanied by the relevant
images, while someone learning the Japanese language would be better served by a
poem in its kanji and romanized versions, along with an audio recitation and
highlighted links from the keywords in the poem to their full dictionary
entries. More expert users might want to run sophisticated search queries on the
dictionary, and a student of comparative literature might want to cross-query
the dictionary against the English Poetry Database or a similar collection.
In order to present these multiple views of the project, we have encoded the data
in XML-compliant TEI and have generated much of the output with XSL stylesheets.
This represents a major transition for the Etext Center, which since 1992 has
stored data in SGML and converted it "on the fly" to HTML with CGI scripts. The
nature of the saijiki data, with its deeply nested hierarchies and the
database-like entry structure, combined with our need to sort, recombine and
re-present this data very nimbly, led us to an XML/XSL workflow. However, we
made some sacrifices with this approach. Our on-the-fly delivery of the data
through XSL stylesheets has been considerably slower than a comparable CGI
transformation. For this reason, we currently deliver large chunks of data
through CGI or as XSL-generated static HTML pages while we work to reduce the
delivery time.
A further complication has arisen from our need to use UTF-8 encoding for this
project, instead of the EUC encoding we have used in the rest of the JTI
collection. Unicode allows us to easily represent kana and hiragana alongside
Western characters, including macron vowels that aren't part of the EUC
character set. However, our OpenText search tool does not support Unicode; until
current work on Unicode compatibility for OpenText is completed, we need to
convert the Unicode to EUC prior to indexing and essentially maintain two
parallel versions of the same data.
In the coming year, we look forward to translating the remaining portions of the
Nyumon Saijiki, adding to the supplementary multimedia materials, and
integrating this haiku collection both "vertically" (with our other
Japanese-language materials) and "horizontally" (with other poetry collections
and dictionary projects across our holdings).