Design of Narrative Book Collection: Redesigning Pre-Modern Japanese Books in the Digital Age

Abstract

This paper introduces Narrative Book Collection—a unique model of digital exhibition for pre-modern Japanese books that explores computational and visualization approaches to create a new book reading experience in the digital age.

Narrative Book Collection uses both verbal and nonverbal aspects of books to enable distant and close reading, and reveals cultural features in a narrative format. This paper describes the process of design and implementation of a digital exhibition inspired in approximately 200 titles selected from an extensive collection of pre-modern Japanese books from the 8th to the 19th century, kept by Keio University’s Library and the Institute of Oriental Classics.

The process throughout this research clarified four basic components that compose Narrative Book Collection: (a) Storytelling: establishment of story based on the exhibition aims, (b) Data generation: generation and filing digital data of rare books, (c) Story-driven data analysis and visualization: computational analysis and visualization of digital data, (d) Narrative viewpoints: create viewpoints and interaction with the collection. These components enable the model to provide access, reading, and interaction with the digital collection.

By focusing on both verbal and nonverbal aspects of books, this research allows wide audiences—regardless of their baseline differences in ethnic, regional, or knowledge of Japanese—to interact with its diverse elements of pre-modern Japanese book. The implementation of Narrative Book Collection provides practical and comprehensive insights of Japanese culture through pre-modern Japanese book collections, and opens a new door for digital exhibition of books.