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A Platform for Mining and Visualizing Regional
Collective Culture
Shin Ohno, Shinya Saito, and Mitsuyuki Inaba
Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures,
Ritsumeikan University
56-1 Tojiin-Kitamachi, Kita-ku, Kyoto 603-8577, Japan
{shin,ken,inabam}@arc.ritsumei.ac.jp
Abstract.
This paper proposes computational methods for mining and
visualizing collective culture among the community members of a region.
This paper first outlines a procedure to extract significant narratives with
text mining technique and spatiotemporal analysis on the textual data
transcribed from oral-history interviews with the regional community
members. It also introduces the KACHINA-CUBE system that imports
the narratives as contextualized fragments of sentences based on spa-
tiotemporal information, visualizes them onto a virtual 3D space, and
assist researchers to discover commonalities and diversities among them
based on the trajectory equifinality model (TEM), which is a theoreti-
cal framework to clarify both the similarities and differences among the
trajectories of individual life courses. At the end of this paper, we illus-
trate a test case on collective culture regarding the once-flourishing film
industry in Kyoto.
Keywords:
collective culture, personal culture, text mining, narrative
analysis, qualitative GIS.
1
Introduction
A new interdisciplinary approach, Cultural Computing [9] focuses on applying
computer technology for preserving, sharing, and analyzing tangible and intan-
gible culture. Since the concept of culture is broad, complex, and ambiguous, it
is important for researchers to recognize their perspective or scope for approach-
ing to culture before they apply computing technology to cultural phenomena
or cultural artifacts.
In this paper, we set our viewpoint on culture by adopting the concept of cul-
ture proposed by J. Valsiner [10]. A socio-cultural psychologist, he argues that
the culture is a dynamically emerging phenomenon that is co-constructed by
the interplay between “personal culture” and “collective culture.” The former
consists of personal sense, memory and knowledge, while the latter is considered
as collection of the former. There exists dynamic interplay between personal
and collective cultures, and they go through the process of “internalization” and
“externalization.” Through the process of communication with others, personal
