The Hentaigana App

The HYU:MA (?????) project, a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Waseda University, establishes a new model for library-supported digital history focusing on Japanese literature, visual arts, and theater traditions. Moving beyond traditional academic silos, the project utilizes a "humanities macroscope" metaphor to provide researchers and students with computational access to large historical corpora, enabling analysis across micro (close reading), meso (mid-level), and macro (distant reading) scales. The foundational success of this initiative is the Hentaigana App, a mobile tool for iOS and Android that employs actual historical manuscripts to teach premodern Japanese calligraphic writing, allowing scholars to engage more closely with the original historical context of texts rather than relying solely on typeset editions. Building on this model, the HYU:MA suite has expanded to include an interactive N-gram visualizer that allows for the exploration of word frequencies across centuries of Japanese poetry, including the imperial waka anthologies. Researchers also utilize a "confusion matrix" to compare human-assigned poem genres with those of a computational classifier, a process that frequently highlights liminal poems of significant cultural and historical interest. Further tools in development employ topic modeling to generate visualizations of semantic themes within singular works like Genji monogatari or vast digital libraries such as Aozora Bunko. Experimental methods in image processing also allow for the automatic generation of mosaics and color profile visualizations for visual products like ukiyo-e prints and Ezukushi banzuke playbills, overcoming the difficulties of traditional text-based analytical approaches for visual media. Central to the HYU:MA model is the active partnership between faculty and library specialists, ensuring the long-term sustainability of digital tools and providing more accessible, compelling instructional methods for new generations of Japanese cultural history scholars.