Naoya Iwata Spoke at the 127th NU Cafe on the Future of Classical Texts

On the evening of April 10, 2026, the 127th NU Cafe “SCIENCE, AND ME” — titled “Reading by Hand, Opening Up through the Digital: How Do We Pass Classical Texts on to the Future?” — was held at LOAM HALL in Common Nexus, directly connected to Nagoya University Station. Despite a spring storm, the event drew 64 participants.

In the first half, Yoshitaka Hibi (Professor, Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University) discussed collaborative reading by humans and computers through TEI markup of Natsume Soseki’s novels. Naoya Iwata then took the stage with “In What Form Will Ancient Greek Texts Reach the Future?” He traced how the texts of Plato and Aristotle have changed form over 2,400 years — from oral transmission to handwritten manuscripts, from manuscript to print, and now to digital data — and considered the new turning point brought about by generative AI, drawing on examples from the Humanitext project.

In the roundtable that followed, Keisuke Unno (Professor, Waseda University) and Yumie Kato (Associate Professor, Nagoya University) joined the conversation, bringing their experience with databases of pre-modern Japanese books and waka poetry corpora. Discussion ranged from the philosophical question of whether an LLM can be said to “know” anything, to the value of deliberately slow reading in an age of summaries.

A full report (in Japanese) is available on the university’s outreach blog “Nagoya University Research Frontline,” which also includes a nearly uncut video recording of the event.