Emending and databasing of historical earthquake documents in the Japanese ancient and medieval ages and development of an open-access system

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Almost all of Japan's known historical earthquake records since around the 6th century, which are clippings from various historical sources, have been published in type-printed books of 29 volumes. They are invaluable primary data for the Japanese historical seismology and volcanology, although unknown historical materials should further be searched for and added. There are, however, two serious problems in these books. One is that they contain rather many unreliable materials because the compilers did not carry out any critical examination of historical sources nor selection, which tends to produce errors in historical earthquake catalogs. The other is that the books are just a huge amount of printed papers, which makes full-scale utilization of massive information including keyword searching impossible.In order to improve these situations fundamentally concerning the ancient and medieval ages, we critically examined all the related historical documents in the existing collections, selected them, carefully emended every text, and composed a re-edited collection in digital form (by XML) through interdisciplinary collaboration among earth scientists, historians and information scientists. Then, we constructed a full-text digital database of all historical earthquake/volcano documents in the ancient and medieval ages (up to ca. A.D. 1600) and developed an open-access system for future improvement of the database by not only the composers but also end-users. Although we restricted the target within the ancient and medieval ages because historical sources in these times have somewhat different characteristics from those in the early modern age and historical records in the latter age are too huge amount to be treated by a small research group, the methodology and technique established in our project can be applied effectively to the early modern age. The database is to be released through internet soon.