Position 2:
Who We Are:
The Digital Tokugawa Lab is a digital humanities lab focusing on early modern Japanese history. For detailed description of the team and our project, please see link.
https://dtl.macmillan.yale.edu/
Your Role:
Understanding the relationships between early modern villages
The early modern village was one of the basic units of administration in Tokugawa Japan, and often also a community of fate. We are building a database to track all 65,000 of them across 270 years. While the village was important everywhere in Japan, precise definitions varied by region and time. One of the greatest challenge for tracing their history in a database is that villages could split or merge. They could also have hierarchical relationships with one another, so that a larger village would sometimes subsume a smaller one in some documents but not in others. By our estimate, as much as 25% of our villages experienced a complication of this kind. The role of the RA will be to track these changes by investigating in an encyclopedic source in modern Japanese, available online. A high level of reading comprehension is required to grasp the situation in each village and translate it into our database. Reading about the organizational history of hundreds of Japanese villages may be grueling work, but it will also invite you to imagine the real and messy lives in remote villages of rural Japan, whose people did not consider the convenience of later Yale researchers in how they organized and reorganized their communities.
Microsoft Excel and/or Access will be the main software for this task. We will teach you how to work with the specific functions in relevant software.
Other tasks are likely to arise in the course of the project, including literature searches at SML.
We expect our RAs to put in at least 10 hours a week on average, though more may be assigned if the RA wants to put in more hours. For students on a gap year, we are happy for them to work with us full time.
Qualifications:
- Advanced Japanese.
- Attention to detail.
- Interest in digital humanities, history, and/or historical geography.
- Basic knowledge of Japanese history would be a plus.
Down the line, other tasks may come up within the project, but the work mentioned here will take hundreds of hours, likely spread over a several RAs.
Compensation
We won’t be able to offer co-authorship on our project. But we hope that you will learn skills and facts worth learning when you work with us, including an intermediate understanding and use of historical database.
The pay would be $15 hour.
Applying
To apply, please send us a resume, a list of courses you have taken at Yale, and a brief statement of the nature of your interest and relevant background (around 150-300 words). Please email these materials to yuki.hoshino@yale.edu.
We will begin reviewing applications on Dec. 17th.