Yukiko Kawamoto
Collaborator
Associate Professor, Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences / Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University
Ph.D. in Classics from King's College London. She specializes in Roman architectural and cultural history, with a focus on domestic architecture, gardens, and landscapes, combining archaeological and textual approaches. She is involved in the EpiDoc digital epigraphy project and the SPinACH project on astronomical phenomena in classical sources. Within the Humanitext project, she contributes to Humanitext Planetarium, which builds planetarium narrations based on classical sources, and to the Digital Digesta research on Roman legal texts. Recipient of the Nagoya University Top Female Researcher Award (2025) and the Rome Award from the British School at Rome (2016).
Within the Humanitext project, she is involved in the following research:
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Digital Digesta
- Digital Digesta is a project to digitize the Mommsen edition of Justinian’s Digesta using AI-based OCR. The Digesta is an important text in Roman law and the foundation of modern civil law. The Mommsen edition, the standard critical edition, has a complex typographic structure — Latin body text, annotations, and critical apparatus — that conventional OCR could not handle with sufficient accuracy. This project addresses that challenge using a high-precision OCR system built on multimodal large language models (mLLMs). Drawing on her expertise in Western Classics, she contributes to the collation of the text and the contextualization of Roman law within its cultural-historical framework. Following a presentation at the Digital Digesta Workshop in February 2026, she co-presented “From Roman Jurisprudence to Modern Japanese Statutes” at a Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory online seminar, and “Digital Digesta: Unveiling the Origins of Law with AI” at a civil law history research group meeting in March 2026.
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Humanitext Planetarium
- Japanese planetariums have developed a distinctive tradition of weaving ancient Greek and Roman myths and literature into their narrations of the constellations. However, because Japanese translations of the relevant classical sources remain incomplete, inaccurate information that does not rely on original texts has spread, and planetarium narrations have come to include content that lacks precision. Humanitext Planetarium is a project that addresses this problem. Specifically, it aims to digitize the original Greek and Latin texts of astronomy-related classical works — including Eratosthenes’ Catasterismi, Manilius’ Astronomica, and Hyginus’ De Astronomia — and integrate them into the Humanitext platform, thereby providing accurate, source-based knowledge about the constellations and astronomical phenomena of antiquity. Through this interdisciplinary fusion of Western Classics and astronomy, the research was carried out with the collaboration of graduate and undergraduate students in Western Classics, contributing to the improvement of planetarium narrations and educational programs.