Hi All,
With apologies for the late notice, please join us if you can for an in-person event tomorrow at the CUNY Graduate Center, and please share widely:
Masahiro Shimoda & Kiyonori Nagasaki
on the Reiwa Buddhist Canon project
Wednesday, January 21, 2026 – 12:30-2pm
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5307
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From Philology to Digital Infrastructure: The Origins and Methodological Significance of the Reiwa Buddhist Canon Project
Masahiro Shimoda
Professor of Buddhist Studies, Musashino University
Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo
This presentation reflects on the origins and methodological significance of the Reiwa Buddhist Canon project, focusing on how traditional philological practices in Buddhist Studies have been reconfigured through long-term digital infrastructure development. Rather than beginning from recent technological advances, the talk traces the project’s starting point in textual scholarship: the need to account for large-scale textual variance, editorial judgment, and the material conditions of canonical transmission.
By situating the digital canon within this methodological lineage, the presentation argues that digital infrastructures are not merely technical tools but epistemic frameworks that shape how knowledge is produced, evaluated, and transmitted. The project is presented as an early and sustained attempt to rethink humanities research at scale, offering insights that remain relevant in the current AI-driven research environment.
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AI Technologies Behind the Reiwa Buddhist Canon Project: Methods, Workflows, and Current Progress
Kiyonori Nagasaki,
Professor of Library and Information Science, Keio University
Senior fellow, International Institute for Digital Humanities
This presentation focuses on the AI technologies underpinning the Reiwa Buddhist Canon project and reports on their current state of implementation. Rather than treating AI as an end in itself, the project adopts AI as an assistive and accountable component within a large-scale digital research infrastructure.
The talk introduces concrete workflows, including AI-based OCR for classical texts, automated text segmentation and alignment, and data enrichment processes designed to support large-scale re-compilation and analysis of the canon. Current progress, challenges, and evaluation strategies are discussed, with particular attention to how AI outputs are integrated with scholarly judgment. Through this case, the presentation illustrates how AI can be embedded in humanities research infrastructures to extend scale and usability without obscuring methodological transparency.
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Best,
Matt
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Matthew K. Gold, Ph.D.
Director, M.A. Program in Digital Humanities & M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization /
Associate Professor of English & Digital Humanities /
Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, CUNY Graduate Center
http://mkgold.net | @mkgold
pronouns: he/him/his
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