Introduction

Over the past fifteen years, Digital Humanities (DH) has become firmly established in Japan, symbolically marked by the founding of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities in 2011. As in many other regions, DH methods are now increasingly visible across a wide range of humanities disciplines with long-standing scholarly traditions [Spinaci et al. 2022]. Nevertheless, the visibility, comparability, and evaluability of DH research outputs remain uneven.

One persistent structural factor shaping this unevenness is language. In research domains where scholarly communication relies heavily on non-English languages, language barriers have long constrained the international circulation of research outcomes [Risam 2018]. This condition applies equally to conventional humanities scholarship and to DH-based research; the adoption of digital methods does not in itself resolve the problem of global visibility.

Japanese Islamic and Middle East studies (hereafter MENA studies) provides a representative case. The field has a rich intellectual history and a substantial accumulation of research [Miura 2004; Sunaga 2025], yet work produced in Japanese—whether digitally oriented or not—remains difficult to situate within global DH discourse. Consequently, it is often unclear how DH methods are currently being used, which thematic areas they address, and how they relate to established research trajectories.

Objectives

This ongoing project addresses these issues by proposing a mapping-based, exploratory approach to visualizing DH practices in Japanese MENA studies. Rather than framing DH as a solution to linguistic barriers, the project aims to render both conventional and DH-based research methodologically legible and structurally comparable within a shared analytical space.

The objectives are threefold. First, the project aggregates and visualizes existing MENA research outputs that employ DH methods (hereafter DH-MENA) in order to provide an overview of current methodological tendencies and to support reflexive research planning within the field. Second, by incorporating traditional Japanese MENA scholarship as a baseline, it enables a diachronic comparison between pre-DH and post-DH research phases, clarifying patterns of continuity, transformation, and methodological reorientation. Third, by decomposing research outputs into thematic and methodological elements, the study establishes a framework that enables comparison across disciplines and linguistic communities without presupposing direct textual accessibility.

Data Collection

The project centers on Japanese-language research outputs, treating linguistic locality as an analytical condition rather than a limitation. This focus allows the study to capture how DH is actually adopted and articulated within domestic research contexts, including work that remains invisible in internationally dominant publication venues.

Data collection is divided into two phases. For the pre-DH period, the baseline corpus consists of Japanese-language doctoral dissertations in MENA studies. Doctoral theses were selected because they provide relatively standardized yet thematically diverse representations of research structures, disciplinary orientations, and scholarly priorities prior to the widespread introduction of DH methods.

For the post-DH period, DH-MENA research outputs were collected from two types of sources: national research project databases that document publicly funded academic projects, and researcher-curated academic profile platforms that record publications, projects, and methodologies based on self-reporting. The former provides structured information on institutionally recognized research activities, while the latter enables the identification of emerging and experimental DH practices that may not yet have resulted in formal publications. Together, these sources offer complementary perspectives on the current landscape of DH-MENA research in Japan.

Methodology

The analytical core of the project is a two-dimensional mapping framework that visualizes the relationship between MENA research themes and DH methods. One axis represents thematic dimensions (e.g., region, historical period, disciplinary orientation), while the other represents DH methodological categories such as text mining, GIS, network analysis, and digital archiving. Research outputs are plotted within this matrix and visualized as a heatmap.

Thematic keywords are derived from Japanese-language research outputs, reflecting the internal conceptual structure of the field. DH methodological categories, by contrast, are standardized with reference to internationally established DH vocabularies. This asymmetric design situates locally grounded research within a globally recognizable methodological space without requiring linguistic translation.

The project is conducted collaboratively: HAYASHI Yuta is responsible for data collection and corpus construction, while SUNAGA Emiko leads the analytical design, manual classification, and interpretation of the mapping results.

Expected Outcomes and Future Directions

As a poster presentation reporting on an ongoing project, this study presents preliminary visualizations that reveal concentrations and gaps in DH adoption within Japanese MENA studies. The mapping highlights areas of methodological clustering as well as underexplored thematic–methodological intersections.

These findings support a strategic positioning of Japanese DH-MENA research within global DH by emphasizing selective, context-sensitive methodological choices rather than uniform adoption. The mapping framework is designed to be extensible, enabling future synchronic comparison with DH-MENA research in other linguistic and regional contexts. In this way, the project contributes to broader DH discussions on comparability, visibility, and methodological diversity beyond English-dominant research environments.