18 August 2026
[Event Report] “Creativity, AI, Kafka: New Horizons in Textual Scholarship” (July 18, 2026)
On Saturday, July 18, 2026, the Research Center for Textual Scholarship held a workshop and symposium titled “Creativity, AI, Kafka: New Horizons in Textual Scholarship” at Seijo University. The event attracted a diverse audience, comprising students, researchers, and professionals from a wide range of organizations, including private companies. The program concluded successfully as a meaningful and fruitful one, with enthusiastic exchanges of opinions between the speakers and the floor concerning the author’s creativity and the tracking of its development — especially the identification of the writing process using AI.
At the workshop, two young researchers presented research reports. Dr. Shunsuke Moribayashi (Daito Bunka University; Visiting Scholar at the Center) explained the problem of chapter arrangement in Franz Kafka’s The Trial and the issue of Kafka’s unique writing style in the text, which goes back and forth between multiple chapters, and then spoke about the emphasis of the editorial project, which will arrange the text in accordance with the writing process. Following this, Yu Tomizuka (Seijo University; Research Assistant at the Center) gave a presentation on the problems surrounding the reconstruction of the writing process in the history of textual editing of Friedrich Hölderlin, using the manuscript known as the “Homburg Folio” as an example. Lively discussions followed in the Q&A session with an eye toward future editing practices, including what an edition focused on the writing process should look like, and how the concept of a ‘work’ is understood in such editing.
At the symposium, first, Dr. Kiyoko Myojo (Seijo University; Director of the Center) and Dr. Kengo Terasawa (Future University Hakodate) gave a lecture titled “Exploring Kafka’s Writing Chronology: Problems of Textual Scholarship and the Future of the Humanities.” In the first half of the lecture, Dr. Myojo first gave an overview of the editorial history of Kafka’s The Trial as an introduction. She then discussed the transition points in Kafka’s zigzag writing of multiple chapters, the human analysis conducted within the ongoing editorial project and its limitations, as well as the potential for AI to play a certain role in a more precise analysis.
In the second half of the lecture, Dr. Terasawa, who is actually tackling this problem using AI, presented aspects of this analysis. After outlining the analysis model, which uses deep learning, Dr. Terasawa explained that by extracting and analyzing words that frequently appear in the manuscripts, he and his colleagues have succeeded in identifying Kafka’s writing periods with high accuracy. Thus, the possibility that AI could open up new horizons regarding the writing process was demonstrated. Furthermore, this analysis is based on facsimile images of the manuscripts presented in the currently published Franz Kafka-Ausgabe. This suggests that the application of AI in literary research is a widely applicable method, indicating a high probability of success in analyzing the writing process even without necessarily having the original physical manuscripts in hand.
During the subsequent Q&A session, extensive discussions took place not only regarding the specific analysis, such as the applicability of the analysis to non-alphabetic characters including Japanese, but also regarding the role of human literary scholars in using AI.
Next, as an invited lecture, Dr. Felix Christen (Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation; Visiting Scholar at the Center) gave a lecture titled “Multilingualism, Self-Translation, and Verbal Echoes: Rilke’s Creativity between Languages.” Rainer Maria Rilke was originally an author who wrote in German, but in his later years, he also began writing poetry in French. For him, French was something that could not be translated into German, especially from the perspective of “sound.” Therefore, Dr. Christen argued that even in cases where Rilke attempted to write poetry on the same motif in French and then wrote it again in German, it was not merely a self-translation of one text, but a text that could by no means be considered equivalent. In addition to this example, Dr. Christen cited the French poetry collection Vergers, published during Rilke’s lifetime, as a further example of Rilke’s poetry creation focusing on sound. According to Dr. Christen, in this poetry collection, the association of French words originating from specific sounds plays a major role in the creation of poetry, and it is precisely this echoing of words that lies at the root of Rilke’s creativity.
In the Q&A session, a passionate discussion ensued between the speaker and the floor on a wide range of points, from issues related to the Center’s activities, such as what editing should look like to express Rilke’s cross-lingual creativity, to Dr. Christen’s fundamental interest in the ‘space’ between languages, stemming from his background in multilingual Switzerland.
The Research Center for Textual Scholarship will continue to organize events on topics related to textual scholarship. Announcements will be posted on our website. We warmly welcome all those interested to join us at future events.
