2016 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Voices from Tohoku: 3.11 Oral Narrative Archive
| Project/Area Number |
26285116
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| Research Institution | Sophia University |
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Principal Investigator |
Slater David 上智大学, 国際教養学部, 教授 (70296888)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
伊藤 毅 上智大学, 国際教養学部, 准教授 (10646863)
FAHY Sandra 上智大学, 国際教養学部, 准教授 (70726702)
猿谷 弘江 上智大学, 総合人間科学部, 助教 (80726076)
木村 護郎クリストフ 上智大学, 外国語学部, 教授 (90348839)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
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| Keywords | Archive / Oral Narrative / Disaster / Ethnography / Tohoku / Digital video / Civil society / Anthropology |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
1. Voices from Tohoku. We have completed the data collection of more than 500 hours of video oral narrative on the 2011 Disasters. This makes our project the largest collection of oral narratives, either on video or otherwise, of the great Disaster. Scholarly Archive - closed use. During the final year, we have focused on post-production. The finishing and checking of transcriptions for each of the videos and some of the English for future publications, The creation of meta-data - the tagging and coding and identification of data based on biographical, geographical, and thematic markers.
2. Open Community Website (tohokukaranokoe.org) - open use. Using the data refinements above, we have used this final year to optimize the website in terms of security from virus, reliability of links and each of use.
3. Voices of Civil Engagement. We have already collected a bit more than 200 hours from anti-nuclear activists, NPO leaders and follower, and are now working on homeless and the groups supporting these groups. For this project, we are still doing the post-production work as listed above as the data is rougher and not yet processed - since we started this later.
4. Presentations of Data. We have presented our data at conferences and gakkai at Paris, Berlin (Berlin Free University), Boston (Harvard University), New York (Columbia University) and in Japan, Kobe and Tokyo. We are currently in the process of assembling and edited volume, Women’s Voices in Post-Disaster Japan, and seeking a publisher in the US and in Japan.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
We have been able to stick to our plan. Because we were able to collect far more data than we expected in Voices of Tohoku, this has taken us longer than we originally proposed to do the full post-production, but we have made good progress. In the Voices of Civil Engagement, we were careful to limit the total amount of data because we knew it would take us longer to do post-production. The website is not yet open, but we are making good progress in terms of structure and the release of materials.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Voices from Tohoku:
We have met the two biggest challenges that we had set for ourselves: 1) organize the scholarly archive into a coherent and useful collection of data; and 2) to make an open community website that could be viewed by the world. For the scholarly site, we need to both make it more user-friendly into the future, and to do more presentations in order to let the world know about it. As expected, these will require future funding in grants, and we are applying for those now. The community website is open and we do not expect to make major changes to it. It is being well-used by scholars and the general public both in and beyond Japan.
Voices of Civic Engagement- the creation of “Digital Humanities”
We have met our biggest challenge - to apply our innovative video oral narrative to non-disaster contexts. This represents one of the only such sites in Japan that uses this methodology for the documentation of contemporary urban society. We have had various offers for collaboration in Japan and internationally, and we are now trying to identify the digital expertise to more fully realize the potential of our data. Our book, Alternative Politics of Contemporary Japan has been accepted by the University of Hawaii Press.
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| Causes of Carryover |
In order to continue to with the post-production of the scholarly archive, we decided to reserve some of the money for the year 2017. Our emphasis was on the detailed transcription of the remaining interviews and the checking of the translations.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
From April 2017, we are working to arrange for a small number of scholars trained in the immediate field to review in depth of details of the interviews. We will spend this money end of they year.
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