Creating Structured and Reusable Data for Tourism and Commerce Images of Edo: Using IIIF Curation Platform to Extract Information from Historical Materials.

PurposeOur final research goal is to restore Edo’s historical city conditions (Tokyo’s former name before the late 19th century) using historical materials. In particular, we focus on non-textual materials. For textual materials, TEI is the de facto standard. For non-textual materials, we need to find new ways as just collecting images is insufficient. We need to organize images as data for analysis across historical materials.Material and MethodThe tool used for this work is the IIIF Curation Platform (ICP). “Curation” with ICP is a generic method that allows us to gather IIIF images or parts of images and add metadata to each. Curation allows images to be organized as structured and reusable data.A large number of digitized pre-modern Japanese books are being released by multiple Japanese institutions. We used ICP to organize 1255 images from eight guidebooks in the Edo period then organized 2489 images from the Edo shopping guidebook.Findings and DiscussionThe current curated data confirmed the relationship between famous places and commerce. Presently, our finding reconfirms previous studies. The Asakusa area has many shops around Sensoji Temple today. However, there were many medicine dealers in one corner of Nihonbashi area unlike today (Figure 1–2).By applying our method to Edo period publications, we not only structure useful information for our research, but also provide reusable data for other researches.Figure 1: Nihonbashi area illustration curated from Edo guidebooks. Nihonbashi was one of the most famous places in the Edo period. Figure 2: Advertisement of Nihonbashi merchant curated from the Edo shopping guidebook. There are many Chinese and Japanese medicine dealers unlike today.