ABSTRACT

Mapping Japan’s feudal territories across 270 years and down to each of the 60,000 villages is the main project in the inaugural two years of the Digital Tokugawa Lab. Tokugawa Japan has an enormous volumeof surviving documentation and a sophisticated historiography. Accu– rate territorial maps that go beyond small regions and individual years, however, have remained elusive. Rather than trying to modifyexisting maps that were created from top-down information, ourteam is reassembling Tokugawa Japan’s territorial structure from itsbasic units, the villages. We identify each village in space and thentrack its history through the early modern period. Villages can emerge and disappear, split and merge. By grouping individual villages, we recreate the changing shapes of individual domains, bannerman pos-sessions, and religious territories. The lab combines a close evaluationof archival maps and historical texts with digital techniques such as text mining, natural language processing, neural networks, and geo- databases. We aspire to communicate the results with full transpar-ency about any uncertainties that remain unresolved.

SPEAKER BIO

Fabian Drixler is professor of history at Yale University. He is a histori- an of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan and the demographic past. His work has long tried to generate new insights by bringing together a close reading of texts and images with quantitative and geospatial ap- proaches. His book Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in East- ern Japan, 1660–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) wins the John Whitney Hall Book Prize. Prof. Drixler established the Digital Tokugawa Lab in 2019.

REGISTRATION

https://cityu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pdu2orT4tHNXKJ_HsJ1mhe_scd-GL9igE

原文始发于微信公众号（香港人文情报小侦探）：【线上讲座】Fabian Drixler: 关于德川日本的数字地图