Re-interpreting the Paintings and Poems of the Lotus Sutra by a Co-occurrence Network: The Religion and Life of Aristocratic during the Japanese Medieval Ages

This presentation intends to explore the correlation between Waka literature and the paintings of the whole Lotus Sutra in Japan from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, as derived from a correspondence analysis between the two, using extracted vocabularies of annotation and visualization by applying a dimension reduction. In addition, I mainly analyze the twenty-one imperially commissioned poetry anthologies for the literature of the Lotus Sutra, and for paintings, I focus on the frontispieces of the Lotus Sutras written in gold and silver inks on indigo-dyed papers. In particular, I attempt to reinterpret the visualization of dimension reduction by using a new method such as t-SNE (t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) in addition to conventional PCA (principal component analysis) to emphasize the differences instead of similarities. This may further reveal the literary peculiarities of the rhetoric, the nature of the “narrative”, or the visual arts-specific rhetoric such as “decoration” and newer contexts.