Multidisciplinary Collaborative Projects
These are projects in which NIHU’s institutes take on a central role while collaborating with other NIHU’s institutes as well as universities and other external institutes, working with research themes that cut across different fields. There is a collaboration with Japanese and overseas research institutes and researchers in diverse fields such as the humanities, information science, conservation science, and environmental studies, as well as with local communities, to engage in interdisciplinary research that transcends the boundaries of specializations.
Interdisciplinary and Integrated Studies on Local Cultures:Aiming for the Emergence of Novel Communities
Many local communities today are in a critical situation due to frequent disasters and changes within and outside the community. While inheriting existing traditional culture, there is a need for social emergence through new bearers and the culture that is renewed there. In this research, the aim is to actively participate in social and cultural emergence by investigating how a society can be truly sustainable and diverse from cross-cutting perspectives such as conservation science, anthropology, folklore, history, ecology, and linguistics, incorporating traditional culture that is replete with local wisdom and history.
Project Website [Japanese only]
a cultural asset rescued from the Great East Japan Earthquake
- REKIHAKU
[lead institute] - Reintegration of Field Science and the Emergence of Regional Culture [Japanese only]
- MINPAKU
[lead institute] - Building a Model for Effective Utilization of Local Culture [Japanese only]
- NIJL
- Reconstructing Archives and Historical Culture in Depopulated Areas
- NINJAL
- Rediscovery of Citizen Science Culture in the Regions and Today
- RIHN
- Regional Culture Studies to Avoid Disasters by Utilizing the Bounties of Nature [Japanese only]
Object-based Research of Nature-human Interactions up to the Anthropocene
Humanity living in nature have made use of a wide variety of resources from the environment. The goal of this project is to study the relationship between nature and people along temporal and spatial axes by analyzing the concentrations and isotope ratios of elements contained in the human body and substances, and to clarify the changes in human resource usage that lead to modern global environmental problems from the perspective of material culture. In addition to conducting collaborative research with the National Museum of Ethnology on the ancient Andes, the academic collaboration will be done also with universities and research institutes inside and outside NIHU.
Project Website [Japanese only]
"Ancient Andean Ruins and Surrounding Landscape" Photo by TAKIGAMI Mai
- RIHN
[lead institute] - Object-based Research of Nature-human Interactions up to the Anthropocene [Japanese only]
- REKIHAKU
- Chronological, Paleoclimatic and Exchange Researches Based on Isotopes
Expansion Studies of Synthetic Bibliology
The main target is the Edo period and earlier books, and each unit has a common flow of “fragmentation of information into units of lexical level and character composition” to “reconstruction as value-added data,” with the aim of contributing to society today and graduate school classes through the research results, and at the same time innovate at the meta-level of expanding research methods and areas themselves while incorporating AI technology as appropriate. By allowing open access also to failed attempts, this becomes a kind of testing ground for knowledge in the humanities, which invites future breakthroughs.
A symposium by researchers in humanities and information science
- NIJL
[lead institute] - Information Engineering Analysis of Composition and Surface Patterns of Old Type Plates
- REKIHAKU
- Generalization of Engi Shiki through Digital Technology
- NINJAL
- Expansion of Vocabulary Resources Based on Old Dictionaries and Historical Transition of Vocabulary and Notation