Branding East Asian Cultural Studies By “Opening” Access To Research Resources, Research Groups, and Know-Hows

1. Introduction
Kansai University Open Research Center for Asian Studies(KU-ORCAS) aims to build digital archives from Kansai university’s East Asian collections and promote East Asian cultural studies. We were selected for one of the research branding projects granted by a government from FY2017 to FY2021, and our mission is to brand East Asian cultural studies through digital humanities (DH) programs.
In this paper, we will explain our project concepts and current status.
2. Particularity and "openness" of our East Asian cultural studies
KU-ORCAS wants to become an international research hub for East Asian cultural studies through the use of digital archives. It should be noted that East Asian cultural studies in this context does not only cover specific national frameworks such as Chinese history or Korean cultural research, but also a “trans-border” aspect. This is because our university has a long history of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies and this field has been the central theme of research.
The word “trans-border” has two meanings. The first is in the context of the national research framework and the second is in the context of academic research fields. Therefore, we must assume that users include those whose research themes are based on cultural relationships across national and/or regional boundaries within East Asia and users who do not have any expertise in East Asian cultural studies.
Hence, we adopted an "openness" policy to make our collection and resources available to a wide variety of people.
3. Materials provided by our digital archives
Before explaining the aforementioned concept of “openness,” we want to describe our digitization plans.
Our digital collections are roughly divided into three groups. The first group is comprised of pre-modern resources translated into Asian languages such as English-Chinese dictionaries, Chinese grammar text books written in English, and missionary reports. The second group consists of the Hakuen Bunko archives that were formerly owned by Hakuen Shoin, a famous and influential Chinese school in Osaka from the Edo period to the early Showa period. It was also one of the origins of our university. In addition, the Osaka Art Collections from a local art school in the Edo period that has almost been forgotten will be added to the second group. The third group is composed of materials such as excavation data and drawings relating to ancient Asuka and Naniwazu studies, which have been promoted by our university.
The above collections include data from ancient Osaka to modern Chinese history. They show that our research areas and time period are very broad, and hence, our DH programs must embrace a wider vision.
4. Three Concepts of “Openness” and an Open Platform
KU-ORCAS will provide the collections from the standpoint of the three concepts of “openness” and an open platform.
The first concept of openness is the provision of open access to research resources. This refers to the digitization and free provision of materials in our digital archives. In particular, we provide metadata as CC0 and give our collection data the Public Domain Mark. Our university is a member of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Consortium; hence, we release images complying with IIIF standards (see Figure 1).
Figure. 1: Sample Image of Our Digital Archive
The second is the broadening of research groups. This encompasses cooperation with researchers outside our university, i.e., academic societies, educational institutions, and citizens. In particular, we plan to develop a crowd-sourcing system for transcribing digitized materials through which citizens can easily participate in our research.
The third is the opening of research know-hows. We will build a website to disseminate technical know-how and information accumulated through the construction and operation of the digital archives. On site, users will be able to exchange knowledge regarding how to use the data from our digital archives. Furthermore, we will provide instructional YouTube videos that explain how to use our data and create research portals for users to look for DH tools and software related to East Asia cultural studies similar to the DiRT directory(DiRT directory, 2015).
Finally, our open platform will employ the above three concepts of openness and provide a global search engine portal for East Asian IIIF collections.
5. Future Plan
We have provided the digital archives which is Kansai University Digital Archive since the last March(関西大学デジタルアーカイブ, 2019). In the next fiscal year, we will further expand the collection to include a movie brochures collection in Shanghai under Japanese rule and Chinese ancient wooden character datasets to promote DH research in East Asian cultural studies in Japan.

Bibliography

DiRT directory(2015). DiRT directory. https://dirtdirectory.org/, (accessed 8 April 2019).

Nobuhiko Kikuchi(2018). KU-ORCAS: Trans-Border Digital Archives Project for East Asian Cultural Studies. Proceedings of the 8th Conference of Japanese Association for Digital Humanities. Tokyo: NII, pp.120-22.

Nobuhiko Kikuchi, Keiichi Uchida, and Kiyonori Nagasaki. (2018) . 「越境する」デジタルアーカイブの機能要件を考える －KU-ORCASが備えるべきもの－. Research Report of 117th IPSJ SIG Computers and the Humanities, 2018-CH-117(6). pp. 1-6.

関西大学アジア・オープン・リサーチセンター「KU-ORCAS」(2017). 関西大学アジア・オープン・リサーチセンター. http://www.ku-orcas.kansai-u.ac.jp/ (accessed 8 April 2019).

関西大学デジタルアーカイブ(2019). 関西大学デジタルアーカイブ. https://www.iiif.ku-orcas.kansai-u.ac.jp/ (accessed 8 April 2019).