Context Recombination for Digital Cultural Archives

We first introduce our digital archive called ``Toyo Bunko Digital Archive.'' The target of this digital archive is Silk Roads-related rare books written in European languages, and now the archive has more than 5600 images from 27 rare books. The digitization of those books is performed using professional digital cameras, following the automatic processes to obtain electronic text using optical character recognition (OCR) and machine translation to improve accessibility to the contents of book pages. Then we propose the concept of “context” as the key strength of the digital cultural archive, and illustrate some examples on context recombination, which is the main topic of this paper. Then we break down this concept into technical challenges, and it leads to the development of context-based database systems and the design of a new query language, which will be used for our digital cultural archive in the next generation.