Visual Recommendations from Japanese Historical Diary

Hyohanki (or Heihanki) is a historical diary written by a Japanese aristocrat, Taira no Nobunori, during the late Heian era (1132-1184). This diary is well known as a relevant resource for the Japanese research culture of that time period. Although some parts of Hyohanki have deteriorated and some are missing, all remaining pages are digitized into text format, awaiting digital humanities research activities. In this paper, we present a stacked graph visualization as applied to a collection of personal names extracted from the Hyohanki diary. Our system is endowed with a novel recommender engine which allows the system to reveal views from the Hyohanki-name, which potentially represent indicators of name occurrence trends. Our system reveals views using a method based on dwell time as implicit interest indicator. These revealed views might serve users' needs in their analytical tasks.