An Approach to Cross-Age and Cross-Cultural Information Access for Digital Humanities

1. Introduction Since libraries have collection of documents across age and culture, and even language, the libraries are inherently multi-age, multi-cultural, and multilingual. In the digital age, more and more historical documents are being digitized to preserve contents written in deteriorating papers. Library, etc.). It means that more and more old text contents will be accessible on the internet in the near future. Obviously, huge amount of knowledge in old documents is as important as recent born-digital documents typically available on the web, because old documents are the collection of wisdom from B.C. Thus, it might be very useful to be able to access such old documents. However, it is not always easy to retrieve old documents, mainly due to the substantial change in language and culture over time. Therefore, we need a method to access old documents written in ancient language using modern language. We call this method " Cross-Age Information Retrieval ". Moreover, we should consider the cultural difference over time, even for the same language. For this, we need a method of " Cross-Cultural Information Retrieval ". Most of the researches on information retrieval and information access focus on documents written in modern language, but we believe that knowledge and wisdom written in old documents provide rich and valuable information which are not available in modern language documents, especially in web contents. We propose a " Cross-Age and Cross-Cultural Information Retrieval " methods in order to tackle these problems. It will discover hidden knowledge and wisdom written in old documents.