Shifting Use of Katakana

The Shifting Use of Katakana project involved creating a computerized database of katakana words in Japanese in order to assess the changing role of the katakana script in modern Japanese written materials.

The ultimate aim was to chart a basic shift in direction in Japanese orthographic practices in respect to how words are written.

A schema was developed and Oxygen was used for the XML mark up. An eXist database generated statistics about the data, and presented it through a website.