Mr Shigeaki KODAMA

• Associate Fellow, IRCI

• Session 5: Presenter 1

New Initiative to Encourage IRCI’s ICH Researchers’ Network

IRCI contributes to the enhancement of the safeguarding of ICH and the research for safeguarding through promoting research activities on the following domains in consistent with the 2003 Convention:

1. Current status of researches on the safeguarding of ICH;

2. Policies and various methodologies for the safeguarding of ICH;

3. Good practices of the safeguarding of ICH.

As one of its main activities to implement what mentioned above, IRCI has been conducting its Mapping Project from 2013. The aims of this project are:

1. To instigate research activities and develop the researchers’ community through international conferences, experts meetings, and publications;

2. To examine and develop strategies for optimizing the use of research data, while collecting research information.

To achieve the aims, IRCI had held 4 international expert meetings from 2013 to 2016 with the participation of 60 experts in the Asia-pacific region including young researchers. 28 researchers in the Asia-Pacific region participated in the literature survey in 2015 and 2016. The result of the survey, about 2,000 entries of literature, experts and institutions concerning the research for the ICH safeguarding, is stored in IRCI’s database named ‘Research Database on ICH safeguarding in the Asia-Pacific Region’ and available on the Internet.

Through these activities, IRCI has been developing its ICH researchers’ network in the Asia-Pacific region. In this session, I will first review the outline and outcomes of activities within the Mapping project from 2013 to 2016. Then the future orientation of the project to think more effective encouragement of the existing researcher’s network is discussed.

Shigeaki Kodama

Associate Fellow, International Research Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (IRCI)

From 2002, he worked at Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, as a researcher. He got PhD at Kyoto University(2003) on linguistics. In 2006, he moved to Nagaoka University of Technology and engaged in the research on languages in the Internet. From 2011 to 2016, he worked at IRCI for 5 years as an associate fellow and has been working there from 2017 again as an associate fellow.