Cataloguing of Works in Japanese and Japanese-Related Languages in HathiTrust

When I was searching through HathiTrust for Japanese works, I came across works that have different writing formats and sometimes contain rare, indigenous languages but are all categorized simply as ‘Japanese’. In this post, I would like to bring attention to these subtleties and make connections to collections that some of my other classmates have created with similar ideas in order to aid the effort to create a Translation Network with rich connections that artificial intelligence cannot recognize.

The screencast below is showing a work in HathiTrust that is categorized as written in Japanese. It is true that it is mostly in Japanese, but the work is about the Ainu culture and language – a indigenous group in northern Japan – and contains words from their language, albeit in katakana and romanji since Ainu does not have a written system. I would not go as far as saying it is miscatalogued, but I believe having a more granular approach to cataloguing works will make the HathiTrust experience richer. My classmate, Teddy Sweeney, had a similar experience which he outlined in his post, where he found a work that was catalogued as French but was not written in French, and a work that was in Slovak but was catalogued as an ‘Undetermined’ language.

In the Sawyer Seminar that the University of Michigan Department of Comparative Literature held, speaker Xiaoxi Zhang, during the ‘lightning talks of engagements with HathiTrust sources’, mentioned the transition of horizontal text in China from being written right to left to left to right after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. This can be seen in the work The Crescent Moon linked in Ali Bolcakan’s Translation Network, where the horizontal title in Chinese is written right to left. In Japan as well, horizontal text was mostly written right to left until after WWII (after WWII, they were all written in left-to-right format). Some great examples found in HathiTrust are from newspapers, and the pdf and image below are pages from newspapers in HathiTrust. Both pages have horizontal titles that are read from right to left. When looking at their catalog records in HathiTrust, there is no mention of the writing format and for those who are unable to read Japanese, it would be impossible to recognize that one horizontal text in Japanese is written right-to-left and another left-to-right. My classmate Claire Russell brought up a similar concern in her post. Her collection is about Korean works with mixed writing systems – specifically works containing Hangul and Hanja. They are very different writing systems, yet they are not differentiated in the catalog record. She and I both believe that categorizing works by the specific writing systems/formats they use, even within the same language, would be highly valuable to HathiTrust users.