Jiayi Wang received a UROP Humanities Scholars Award grant in summer 2021 to develop a guide to the Hyakunin Isshu 百人一首, a collection of classical Japanese poetry. In spring 2021, Jiayi took coursework in classical Japanese language with Emi Yamanaka where she studied the grammar for reading these poems and was first introduced to the poetry collection and the popular Karuta card game based on it. In fall 2020, she had also taken Sarah Frederick’s course on Tokyo literature where GIS mapping and the tool Story Maps was introduced. She proposed to build a guide to the 100 poems to help learners of classical Japanese and early Japanese poetry and was granted the UROP funding. She worked also with a student Tatr Assakul from Cornell University whom she met through the virtual programs offered by the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies during the pandemic who used his skills programming with R and database design to help manage and organize the information she collected about the poems. UROP funded her time, and also Japanese books about the poetry collection. She presented her poster on the resource at the UROP poster sessions in the fall and plans to continue working on the project during the spring semester as part of a senior honors project.
