Towards the New Horizon of Literary Research : Development of the database of the Tale of Genji

摘要

In the past decade, there has been considerable growth in the development of computers which have become more powerful, faster, and less costly, making it possible to do complex processing easily. Software has become more sophisticated and also inexpensive. But to expand the use of computers in the humanities, good electronic texts are strongly required to provide basic data. Accordingly, many countries have started to develop electronic texts of their own languages. To meet the demand for the new style of research in Japanese studies, I have developed the electronic text of the Japanese version of Genji-monogatari and the English version of the Tale of Genji, translated by E.G. Seidenstiker with the aid of Tokyo Club in 1989. Edited to ASCII codes, the two texts were deposited at the Oxford University Computing Service and started world wide service in 1990. The paper will deal with the whole design of this project and introduce some ideas to analyse literary texts using computers. The structure of the ongoing project of the developing the hyper text is also shown at the end.