Distant Viewing of Ukiyo-e Prints

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. Our dataset is released for public use. 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.

Pavlopoulos, John (author)
Machotka, Ewa,1974-Stockholms universitet,Institutionen för Asien- och Mellanösternstudier (IAM)(Swepub:su)ewma6646 (author)
Stockholms universitetInstitutionen för Asien- och Mellanösternstudier (IAM) (creator_code:org_t)

In:Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation ConferenceMarseilles : European Language Resources Association, s. 5879-5888

By the author/editor: Lagkiou, Konstan ...; Pavlopoulos, Joh ...; Machotka, Ewa, 1 ...

About the subject

NATURAL SCIENCES: NATURAL SCIENCES; and Computer and Inf ...; and Computer Science ...

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