About Parsed Cargoes

Parsed Cargoes is a digital humanities database that aims to anthologize the corpus of Nanban byōbu produced in Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, primarily by the Kanō school.

Despite their significance, the screens remain difficult to study as a whole. Approximately ninety pairs survive, held in museum collections scattered across the world, and they are rarely exhibited together. Only a small fraction has been digitized at high resolution, and these do not include some of the most prominent pairs. The two comprehensive print catalogs of the corpus are decades old, expensive, out of print, and poorly reproduced. The field lacks a modern, accessible, consolidated resource.

By procuring high-resolution images and bringing them together in a single online database, this project aims to address that gap, improving preservation of the artworks themselves (the more fragile ones can remain in storage), increasing scholarly access, and making these works legible to students and general audiences.

Beyond archival access, the database is designed to function as an active teaching and research tool. The project treats each screen as a surface and each recurring figure or object as a motif that travels. Students, scholars, curators, and other contributors annotate image regions and write essays; public visitors can follow those links through the corpus. Each screen is being "hot-spotted," allowing visitors to interact with individual objects and figures and access explanatory text about their origins, transpacific journeys, and local significance. As annotation activity grows, so will the interpretive potential of the database. The accumulation of cross-linked motifs will enable new modes of visual interpretation, a way of looking and reading across screens that exposes the overarching compositional paradigms with which the artists engaged.

The project is led by Drisana Misra, Assistant Professor of Early Modern Japanese Media at Cornell University. Nabeel Siddiqui, Associate Professor of Digital Media at Susquehanna University, is co-investigator.