About the Digital Tokugawa Lab

The Digital Tokugawa Lab is a group of scholars working on digital humanities projects with a focus on pre-modern Japan. For a detailed description of their work, please visit the lab’s website.

Primary Investigator

Fabian Drixler, Professor of History

Research Assistant 1: Establishing Village Boundaries on ArcGIS

Over the summer, a collaborator of the Digital Tokugawa Lab ran a neural network on a corpus of around 1,500 maps from the General Staff Office, surveyed between ca. 1890 and ca. 1940. These are the most highly resolved, full-coverage maps of Japan, showing details at the level of individual trees, wells, and power lines. Although the neural network excerpted municipal (町村) boundaries, there are some gaps that need to be closed manually. Your job will be to close these gaps, then divide the municipalities into Edo-period villages using information from other maps that the lab has collected and georeferenced. The lab will teach you how to work with the specific functions in ArcGIS Pro. Other tasks are likely to arise over the course of the project, including literature searches at Sterling Memorial Library.

Qualifications:

• Attention to detail.
• Interest in digital humanities, history, and/or historical geography.
• Basic knowledge of Japanese history would be a plus.
• Although it is not required for this position, the ability to read or recognize Japanese or Chinese characters would be an advantage. Advanced Japanese would be an even greater advantage.

For more information, please see the full Research Assistant 1 job posting.

Research Assistant 2: Understanding Relationships between Early Modern Villages

The early modern village was one of the basic units of administration in Tokugawa Japan. The Digital Tokugawa Lab is building a database to track all 65,000 of these villages over a span of 270 years. While the village was important everywhere in Japan, precise definitions and boundaries varied by region and time. Your job will be to help research these changes using an online encyclopedic source in modern Japanese. A high level of reading comprehension is required to grasp the situation in each village and translate it into the lab’s database. The lab will teach you how to work with the specific functions in relevant software (primarily Microsoft Excel and/or Access). Other tasks are likely to arise over the course of the project, including literature searches at Sterling Memorial Library.

Qualifications:

• Advanced Japanese is required.
• Attention to detail.
• Interest in digital humanities, history, and/or historical geography.
• Basic knowledge of Japanese history would be a plus.

For more information, please see the full Research Assistant 2 job posting.

Time Commitment and Compensation

Research assistants are expected to work at least 10 hours per week on average. If a research assistant wishes to put in more time, additional hours may be assigned. The pay rate is $15 per hour. Students on a gap year are welcome to work with the Digital Tokugawa Lab full-time.

Applying

To apply, please email a resume, a list of courses you have taken at Yale, and a brief statement of your interest in the position and your relevant background information (around 150-300 words) to Yuki Hoshino.