See how it works → Open the mapping tool →

Drawing from the Crowd: A Citizen Science Platform for Mapping Ukiyo-e Cultural Geography

Smapshot platform showing a Hokusai print of Lake Suwa aligned with modern 3D terrain
The Smapshot platform in action: aligning Hokusai’s view of Lake Suwa with modern terrain data

Welcome! Whether you are enthusiastic about art, love traveling Japan, or are curious about historical landscapes, we are glad you have found us. Through our project, we aim to bring together people from around the globe in order to jointly explore how ukiyo-e, Japanese prints (you might be familiar with the Great Wave or the Red Fuji as representants of this genre) depicted Japan’s famous places. And your participation helps us do that at scale! By joining our growing community of citizen scientists, you help reveal how historic prints of early modern Japan position viewers to experience Japan’s landscapes.

The platform launched in October 2025. It grew out of research at the University of Zurich (UZH)’s Chair of East Asian Art History, where The Nippon Foundation’s Social Innovation Collaboration project first supported its prototype (August 2024–February 2025), and the UZH Graduate Research Campus (GRC)’s Career Funding allowed its implementation (July 2025–June 2026).

By matching depicted landscapes with modern topography, we deepen our understanding of Japan’s historical, artistic and cultural geography while highlighting the importance of nuanced cultural preservation. Every contribution, yours included, helps scholars refine our understanding of spatial representation in early modern Japanese visual culture.

About the Project

How did the creators of historical images, print designers in the Edo period (1603–1868) and early photographers, position viewers to experience Japan’s famous landscapes? This question at the heart of Drawing from the Crowd is our invitation to curious minds from around the world: please help us to find the answer.

Why do we need to compare artistic with geographic data?

Print designers worked topography through convention, through what sold, through earlier pictures of the same place. What is interesting about ukiyo-e prints is that they did not conform to topographic ‘ground truth’, but instead combined information deriving from observed, from imagination, and from previous renderings of places in image and poetry. Some combine several views into one, or transport the viewer up to bird’s height to show a place’s spatial logic from a vantage no one could occupy. By contrasting the topography and its pictorial version, we notice the patterns of looking that the landscape asked, and asks, us, its viewers, to perform. We recover the historical gaze.

What does the project do?

Through georeferencing the prints with you, meaning through aligning prints against topography on a large scale and deriving insight from the contrast, we work to identify which elements of a print reflect actual topography and which stem from artistic convention. Two questions drive the work: how can we tell, collectively, which features are observed and which are conventional? And what does that reveal about how Edo-period prints positioned their viewers to experience Japan’s famous places (meisho)?

What is in it for you?

  • Connect to likeminded people: Join a global community, attend events, and win prizes for taking part.
  • Grow your knowledge: Learn about Japanese art history and geography, including about the places you may have travelled, or come from.
  • Make a research impact: Your work feeds academic research, and can be credited to you if you wish.

How the project began

“Drawing from the Crowd: A Citizen Science Platform for Mapping Ukiyo-e Cultural Geography” began as one of five projects selected for the 2024 Nippon Social Innovator’s Collaboration (NSIC), funded by The Nippon Foundation. The funder asked us to build something socially useful together with other scholarship alumni. That brief gave us the project, and it gave us something we did not expect: a team that thinks across fields. Building on this foundation, we secured implementation funding through a Career Grant from the Graduate Campus (GRC) at the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland.

The platform launched publicly in October 2025, and we began citizen science outreach in December 2025. We are now actively building our community of contributors while expanding our print collection through partnerships with institutions worldwide.

Partners

Drawing from the Crowd is made possible through collaboration with leading institutions in digital humanities and cultural heritage research.

Smapshot Lab (HEIG-VD), Switzerland: Our citizen science platform is built on Smapshot, a crowdsourcing platform and workflow developed by HEIG-VD that enables volunteers to locate historical images in a 3D virtual globe.

Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, Japan: The project is registered at the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC), and we utilize their comprehensive Japanese Prints Portal Database in our research.

Data Sources

Prints: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Taito City Lifelong Learning Center (Tokyo), National Diet Library (Tokyo)

Hiroshige sketchbook drawings: British Museum (London)

Book illustrations (meisho-zue): National Diet Library (Tokyo), National Archives of Japan (Tokyo)

Photographs and further material: Via Japan Search (ADEAC): National Diet Library; Taito City Lifelong Learning Center

Terrain data: Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI)

Data enrichment: Wikidata and GeoHack Toolforge

Sustainability Goals

This project aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

SDG 4: Quality Education: We build our platform to make academic research accessible to anyone with curiosity and an internet connection. Participants learn about Japanese art history, geography, and digital humanities while contributing to scholarship. Much knowledge is built through direct engagement, and the Principal Investigator is available for advice, guidance and feedback.

SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities: By georeferencing historical prints, we create a digital record of how landscapes were perceived over centuries, revealing social and environmental changes and supporting cultural preservation.

Bridging the Digital Divide: In an age of rapid AI advancement, Drawing from the Crowd demonstrates how citizen-generated data can bridge the gap between humanity and its digital environment. Our participatory approach, which keeps the human in the loop, shows that meaningful contributions to knowledge do not require specialist technical expertise, but instead values careful observation and cultural curiosity.

Cite this project

Stephanie Santschi, Himanshu Panday, Hirohito Tsuji, and Drew Richardson, “Drawing from the Crowd: A Citizen Science Platform for Mapping Ukiyo-e Cultural Geography,” ThePrintLab, accessed [date], https://landscapes.theprintlab.org.

If your contributions inspire a paper, thesis, or project, you are welcome to develop them further; we simply ask that you cite the project and appreciate if you let us know about it!

Meet Our Team & Partners

Principal Investigator

Dr. Stephanie Santschi

Dr. Stephanie Santschi

Responsible for project conception, management, publishing, and networking; 3/2024–1/2027 Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of East Asian Art History, Department of Art History, University of Zurich.

PhD from the University of Zurich (2023) & MA Museum Studies from the University of East Anglia (2016). Research interests include art history and digital humanities, particularly the representation of Japanese geography in early modern reproductive visual culture, and citizen science as a research methodology in the humanities.

“Academic research should not stay behind institutional walls. This community is my attempt to share back with the communities that societally support research, with and for it — I’d welcome your questions and ideas about joining in and developing it further.”

Team

Dr. Drew Richardson

Team Collaborator

Postdoctoral fellow at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies, and Director for Curriculum and Research for the Okinawa Memories Initiative at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research examines media and place-making practices in native Japanese ethnography, folklore and monsters.

Himanshu Panday

Co-founder of Dignity in Difference, specializing in digital prototyping, coding, and AI-assisted workflows

Specializes in digital anthropology, particularly citizen science platform development.

“I am interested in curating and exploring new algorithms for citizen science in this project.”

Hirohito Tsuji

PhD Candidate, Networking, Background Research and Japanese Translations

PhD Candidate at the University of East Anglia specializing in the Imperial Family of Japan. Interests include Japanese history, culture, arts, geography and Japanese studies from the perspective of digital humanities.

Partners

Prof. Jens Ingensand

Full Professor, HEIG-VD (Institut INSIT); Head of the Geomatics competence group

A co-creator of Smapshot, the crowdsourcing platform on which this project’s georeferencing takes place. His group develops and maintains the platform that lets volunteers locate historical images on a 3D globe.

Prof. Stéphane Lecorney

Associate Professor, HEIG-VD (Media Engineering Institute)

Contributor to Smapshot’s development at HEIG-VD, supporting the platform and its open API that this project builds on.

Funding and Support

Prototype Development (August 2024–February 2025)

Generously provided by The Nippon Foundation Scholars Association (TNFSA), an alumni network of Nippon Foundation Scholarship recipients.

Implementation Funding (July 2025–June 2026)

Generously provided as a Career Grant for PI Santschi by the Graduate Campus at the University of Zurich.

We are deeply grateful for the support of all team members, partners, institutions, funders, and voluntary contributors.

Start Mapping

You look at a print, work out where the artist positioned the viewer, and match that viewpoint to the 3D model of the landscape by placing corresponding markers on both. It takes about 15 to 30 minutes.

1
Select

Choose a print from the collection.

Selecting a print from the collection
2
Locate

Find where you would have stood to see this view.

Marking the viewing position on the map
3
Align

Match the print to the modern terrain.

Aligning the print with 3D terrain

No Japanese and no art-history background required. Even attempts that do not resolve are useful: they tell us which prints resist geolocalization.

Chrome or Edge browsers work best. An account is optional, but signing in lets you track your own contributions, be cited in publications, and take part in competitions.

A completed georeferencing: the print aligned with modern terrain
A finished result: Hiroshige’s view of the Naruto whirlpools, aligned to modern terrain.

What happens after you submit

Every submission is checked by the project’s lead before it joins the dataset, so it may not appear on the map straight away. If something needs adjusting, you will get a comment explaining how, which is also how you learn to read the prints more closely.

By submitting, you agree that your contributions and username may be used for non-commercial research and teaching. The full terms are under Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Watch the tutorial

For the full research process, see the extended case study. If the platform throws an error, clearing your browser cache usually fixes it.

Blog

Project updates and research insights

June 2026 Dr. Stephanie Santschi Wrapping up the implementation phase means you can now find book illustrations, drawings and photos on the page in addition to prints! The collection doubles, and now includes sketchbooks, photographs and gazetteer pages, not just prints.

After collecting and processing more data (concretely, 1,345 additional records), we have now uploaded a second batch. This doubles the available collection which we can georeference together. Together with this upload, we have also formally wrapped up the GRC-funded Implementation Phase. Its result is this website, a bilingual platform on Smapshot, a small but growing community of contributors, and equally, a dataset that continues to expand and which has inspired first insight.

I am particularly excited that it now includes sketchbooks, photographs and gazetteer pages beyond the prints which we uploaded in a previous step. Remember, until June this was a collection of single-sheet ukiyo-e landscape prints. You will now find two Hiroshige sketchbooks from the British Museum, pages from meisho-zue (the illustrated gazetteers of famous places) from the National Diet Library and the National Archives of Japan, and a set of historical photographs.

These additional records widen the field for discovery and help us answer our research question, how the images mediate the gaze onto the landscape, through now allowing comparison between media. Think about it: even if referring to the same place, a camera, a hand drawing on the spot, and a publisher’s woodblock do something different to the same view. A photograph replicates the geometry it was made with: a camera stood somewhere, whatever the framing, and that precise location can be calculated. In comparison to that, a sketchbook page potentially follows paths and places to rest for a short while, if drawn in front of the thing. In comparison to that, the print studio, with its production team of the print designer, block-cutter, printer and the publisher, were following a sense of what would sell. And even further removed from the place, a meisho-zue illustration was ever understood as an informative illustration of a place, an image conveying spatial, historical, cultural or spiritual truths about a place, not topographical in a statistic sense, so all these media would have different things to say about the visual logic of a place.

Set them along that range, from geometry at one end to composition at the other, and the research question becomes tractable. We have been asking which parts of a print follow the terrain and which follow pictorial convention. Now we can put it across media, and where a sketchbook page and a finished print show the same view, we can watch the change happen and measure it. The photographs close a loop, too.

And while this part of the funding phase has ended, the project has not. Some funding applications that would take the project into the direction of tourism research and of collaboration with text-based citizen science are currently in preparation; and soon, I will also be able to announce a substantial, exciting step in my career.

And in the project, verification carries on, contributions are still very much wanted, and for that we of course invite you warmly! Start mapping →

March 2026 Dr. Stephanie Santschi Drawing from the Crowd at SADiLaR’s DH Colloquium (March 2026) A talk at SADiLaR’s digital-humanities colloquium, and the questions that came out of it.

Drawing from the Crowd, our citizen science platform for georeferencing Edo-period ukiyo-e, was the subject of an hour-long talk at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) DH Colloquium on 25 March. SADiLaR runs a monthly online series where DH researchers from across the world share what they are working on, and I was glad to be part of it.

An hour is long enough to walk through the whole thing properly: where the art historical questions come from, why ukiyo-e prints are difficult to georeference (artists moved Mt. Fuji around to suit their compositions), what the Smapshot adaptation looks like, and what we are hoping citizen scientists will help us figure out. If you have been wanting a fuller picture of the project than the website can offer, the recording is the easiest way in:

Thanks to the SADiLaR team for the invitation, and to everyone who showed up with questions, several of which I am still thinking about.

Watched the video and want to try it yourself? You do not need a specialist background. Here is how to start →

March 2026 Dr. Stephanie Santschi Drawing from the Crowd at AAS 2026, Vancouver Notes from the Association for Asian Studies conference in Vancouver.

From 12 to 16 March I was in Vancouver for the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference. The best part was getting to be in the same room as Dr. Drew Richardson (UC Santa Cruz), who has been part of Drawing from the Crowd from very early on. Most of our collaboration happens across nine time zones, so a few days of working out ideas in person, over coffee and around the poster and in the corridors between sessions, was a treat.

Stephanie Santschi and Drew Richardson at AAS 2026 in Vancouver, standing in front of the Drawing from the Crowd poster
With Drew at AAS 2026, Vancouver

What stood out at AAS was how often the conversation came back to the same question: how do I get involved? Curators wanting to test the platform on their own collections, graduate students looking for thesis angles, librarians thinking about outreach, regional specialists curious about the methodology. People kept asking, which is what we had hoped for.

If you missed it, this followed an hour-long version of the same project at SADiLaR’s DH Colloquium earlier in March.

If we talked in Vancouver and you have been meaning to give it a try, this is your nudge. And if we did not meet, come say hello anyway. Start mapping →

February 2026 Dr. Stephanie Santschi Drawing from the Crowd receives the UZH FAN Award 2026 The project receives the University of Zurich FAN Award 2026.

In early February, Drawing from the Crowd received the University of Zurich FAN Award 2026 in the humanities and social sciences. The FAN Awards are given by UZH Alumni each year to early-career researchers, and the ceremony took place at the “Sparkling Research” event on 3 February.

Stephanie Santschi receiving the UZH FAN Award 2026 at the Sparkling Research event
At the “Sparkling Research” ceremony, 3 February 2026 (photo: Nicolas Zonvi / UZH News)

I feel honoured, and happy. But this kind of recognition is never about one person: it is about a team, partners, funders, and above all the citizen scientists who have already started georeferencing prints. Thank you to everyone who has shown up. Citizen science only works because you do.

And: easier to find us now

Around the same time, the project was officially registered on two of the most widely used citizen science directories. If you have been looking for a project to join, or want to share Drawing from the Crowd with someone who might enjoy it, these are good places to point them:

  • CoLabField (Japan) — a Japanese-language hub for citizen science. Useful for connecting with contributors in Japan.
  • SciStarter — one of the largest international citizen science directories. Educators, researchers, and curious volunteers across the world use it to find projects.

Whichever route you come in by, the work is the same: looking carefully at a print, figuring out where the artist stood, and helping us understand how Edo Japan pictured itself. Come and have a go →

January 2026 Dr. Stephanie Santschi Drawing from the Crowd in Japan: three January talks (Tokyo, Chuo, Keio) Three weeks in Japan, three talks to three very different audiences.

January took me to Japan for three weeks, and inside that stretch I gave three talks to three different audiences: TNFSA scholarship alumni, a DH-and-AI crowd at Chuo University, and museum professionals at Keio Museum Commons. One of the things I like about Drawing from the Crowd is that it can hold a conversation with all of them. Here is a quick look at where I went and what I talked about.

13 January — Nippon Foundation Scholars Association Webinar (virtual)

“Drawing from the Crowd Project Update.” A check-in with the community that backed the original prototype: what has happened since the platform went live, and where we are headed next.

19 January — DALA2025 Keynote, Chuo University (Tokyo)

Keynote at Digital Approach to Literary Analysis 2025 (DALA2025), co-hosted by MEXT and the National Institute of Informatics (NII). My title was “Making Computational Boundaries Visible: AI as Critical Tool in Japanese Visual Studies and Pedagogy”. The argument, in short, is that AI’s most useful role in our field is not answering our questions but showing us where its own answers run out. Drawing from the Crowd sits inside that argument: the things citizen scientists notice are the things algorithms miss.

Stephanie Santschi presenting the DALA2025 keynote at Chuo University, Tokyo
Presenting at DALA2025, Chuo University

22 January — Keio Museum Commons (Tokyo)

「垂民科孊で読み解く浮䞖絵の空間衚珟——Drawing from the Crowdプロゞェクトの玹介」/ “Reading Spatial Representation in Ukiyo-e through Citizen Science.” A Japanese-language presentation for museum professionals at Keio Museum Commons, focused on the question driving the project: when we look at a ukiyo-e landscape, what are we actually seeing? Real terrain, an imagined composition, or, more often than not, something in between, shaped by what viewers of the time expected to see.

The fastest way to understand what these talks were about is to try a print yourself. Fifteen minutes is enough for a first one. Give it a go →

December 2025 Dr. Stephanie Santschi From Prototype to Platform: Our Journey So Far The first post: how the project went from a six-month prototype to a working platform.

We are excited to launch the blog for Drawing from the Crowd! This space will share project updates, research insights, and stories from our growing community of citizen scientists.

Where It All Began

In August 2024, Drawing from the Crowd was selected as one of five projects for The Nippon Foundation’s Social Innovators Collaboration (NSIC). This six-month grant enabled our interdisciplinary team, spanning digital anthropology, spatial history, and Japanese art history, to develop a prototype platform for georeferencing ukiyo-e prints.

The challenge we set ourselves was ambitious: could we adapt existing crowdsourcing technology, designed for historical photographs, to work with stylized Japanese woodblock prints? Unlike photographs, ukiyo-e prints encode space through cultural conventions: artists might move Mt. Fuji for better composition, elongate beaches for dramatic effect, or combine multiple viewpoints into a single image.

Building the Prototype (August 2024–January 2025)

Working with our technical partners at Smapshot Lab (HEIG-VD), we adapted their monoplotting technology for Japanese prints. We sourced images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection and terrain data from Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority. The PI’s Postdoctoral Research at the University of Zurich’s Chair of East Asian Art History provided the art historical expertise to understand how Edo-period prints encoded spatial relationships and positioned viewers.

Beta testing revealed something exciting: while foreground elements in prints are often manipulated for artistic effect, middle and background terrain maintains consistent relationships with actual geography. This means citizen scientists can successfully georeference prints by focusing on terrain contours rather than iconic features like Mt. Fuji.

Sharing Our Work

Throughout 2024–2025, PI Santschi, sometimes together with team members, presented Drawing from the Crowd at conferences and workshops across Europe, Japan, and online:

Late 2025 — Refining details:

  • Sept 2025: “Moving Mountains: Analyzing Spatial Narratives in Ukiyo-e through Citizen Science,” International Symposium of the Nihon kinsei bungaku kai, University of Cambridge (UK)
  • Aug 2025: “Drawing from the Crowd,” 19th Deutschsprachiger Japanologentag, Goethe-UniversitÀt Frankfurt (DE)
  • July 2025: “Reconstructing Japan’s Scenic Past from Prints,” ADHO Digital Humanities Conference (DH2025), with Himanshu Panday, Lisbon (PT)

Early 2025 — Spreading the word:

  • May 2025: “From Print to Place,” The Digital Orientalist Virtual Conference, with Drew Richardson (online)
  • Feb 2025: Project report, Ritsumeikan ARC FY2024 Annual Report Meeting, Kyoto (JP)
  • Jan 2025: 9th Digital Humanities Research Meeting「浮䞖絵、垂民科孊、DH」, Hibiya Library, Tokyo (JP)
  • Jan 2025: Citizen Science Webinar, The Nippon Foundation Scholars Association, Tokyo (JP)

2024 — Conceiving the idea:

  • July 2024: “Viewed at a distance: geography in ukiyo-e prints,” Charting the European D-SEA Conference, Max Planck / Staatsbibliothek Berlin (DE)

The response has been encouraging: scholars and non-specialists alike are excited about contributing to research that reveals how Edo-period prints positioned their viewers to experience landscapes.

Implementation Phase (August 2025–July 2026)

Drawing from the Crowd has secured implementation funding through a Career Grant from the Graduate Campus at the University of Zurich. This support allows us to move beyond the prototype stage and build a fully functional platform.

In the last couple of months, we have:

  • Launched the platform publicly in October 2025
  • Started Citizen Science outreach in December 2025

Going forward, we will:

  • Expand our print collection with data from additional institutional partners (especially ARC Ritsumeikan)
  • Refine the user interface based on feedback
  • Develop educational resources and community features

Join Us

Whether you are a specialist in Japanese art, a geography enthusiast, or simply someone who enjoys visual puzzles, we would love your help in mapping the landscapes of ukiyo-e. Visit our Start Mapping page to learn how to participate, and follow this blog for updates on our progress.

Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Contact

We would love to hear from you! Whether you are a first-time visitor, an experienced researcher, or somewhere in between—if you have questions about participating, suggestions for the project, or ideas for collaboration, please get in touch.

General Inquiries

Principal Investigator

Dr. Stephanie Santschi
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Zurich (Switzerland)
Department of Art History: Chair of East Asian Art History

Follow the Project

Check our Blog for the latest updates and research insights.

Privacy Policy & Terms of Use

Last updated: July 2026

The short version

  • You can take part completely anonymously. Browsing and contributing both work without account, email, or name. There is no minimum age.
  • If you do register, we collect as little as we can: your account details, what you submit, and anonymous usage statistics.
  • We use it to run the platform, do the research, credit you, and build the community. We do not sell it and we do not advertise.
  • Your contributions are published as open research data, with credit to you unless you ask otherwise. Open data cannot be recalled, so please keep personal recollections out, and email them to us instead.
  • Accounts live on Smapshot, not on this website. Deleting an account means asking Smapshot, and we will help.
  • You can ask us to see, correct, or delete your data at any time: .
  • The images themselves (prints, sketchbooks, photographs, gazetteers) belong to the museums and archives that hold them. Their terms apply, and each institution’s own declaration is the authority.

Legal notice

Drawing from the Crowd: A Citizen Science Platform for Mapping Ukiyo-e Cultural Geography (the “Project”) is a research project led by Dr. Stephanie Santschi at the Chair of East Asian Art History, Department of Art History, University of Zurich, and published under the name ThePrintLab.

Dr. Stephanie Santschi
Chair of East Asian Art History, Department of Art History
University of Zurich
RÀmistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland

Contact:

Funding. Prototype development was funded by The Nippon Foundation Scholars Association; implementation by a Career Grant from the UZH Graduate Campus.

Hosting. This website is a static site served by GitHub Pages (GitHub, Inc., 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA). GitHub records server logs, including IP addresses, when the site is visited. The Project does not operate analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies on this website.

Who is responsible for what. Two parties are involved, and this document covers only one of them. The Project (this website) is responsible for the content published here and for the research use of contributed data: how it is analysed, cited, and shared as open research. Smapshot, a separate platform created and operated by HEIG-VD (Haute École d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud), Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, is responsible for the mapping platform itself: user accounts, login credentials, storage of your contributions, and its own handling of that data. Accounts and submissions live on Smapshot’s systems, not on this website. For anything to do with your account or the data held there, Smapshot’s own data policy governs (available in English and Japanese), and the contact is . This document does not restate Smapshot’s terms; where the two touch, Smapshot governs the platform and the Project governs the research use.

Definitions

Project
the research project described above, and the team responsible for it.
Website
landscapes.theprintlab.org and its pages.
Platform
the Project’s collection on Smapshot, operated by HEIG-VD, where georeferencing is carried out.
Services
the Website and the Platform together, and the functionality each provides.
Contributor
any person who submits a Contribution to the Platform, with or without an account.
Contribution
any georeference, alignment, annotation, geographic reference, comment, or other material submitted by a Contributor through the Platform, including unsuccessful attempts.
Collection Images
the digitised historical images made available through the Platform, together with their catalogue metadata, sourced from the collections listed under About. These include single-sheet ukiyo-e prints, sketchbook drawings, historical photographs, and illustrated gazetteer (meisho-zue) pages.
Project Content
the text, images, guides, videos, and other material produced by the Project and made available through the Services, excluding Collection Images and Contributions.
Part I Privacy Policy What the Project does with your personal data. Articles 1–7.

Article 1 — Purpose, scope, and applicable law

The Project respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data and being transparent about how it is collected and used. “Personal data” means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. This Privacy Policy informs you how the Project, acting as data controller, collects and uses your personal data in connection with the Services.

This Policy is governed by the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP); by Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) where it applies to you; and by the Act on the Protection of Personal Information of Japan (APPI, Act No. 57 of 30 May 2003) in respect of participants in Japan, whom this Project actively expects and invites.

Article 2 — Personal data collected

This Policy describes what the Project does with your personal data. Registration, sign-in, cookies, and the operation of the Platform itself are HEIG-VD’s, and are described in their data policy, in English and Japanese. That document governs those matters; this one does not repeat it, and where the two appear to differ about the Platform, theirs is the accurate one.

Browsing. No personal data is collected by the Project when you browse.

What reaches the Project. The Project is a collection owner on Smapshot. Where you are signed in and contribute to its collection without selecting the anonymous option, HEIG-VD may share your username and email address with the Project. That is the only route by which your identity reaches the Project. If you contribute anonymously — which you may do at any time, signed in or not — nothing identifying you reaches the Project at all.

Contributions. Where you make a Contribution, the Project receives the annotations and analyses produced, the geographic references recorded, and any research comments left. See Article 4 on publication.

Statistics. The Project collects statistical information concerning interaction with the Platform, patterns of participation, and technical metrics, in a form that does not identify individual users.

Correspondence. Where you contact the Project by email, your message and email address are retained for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry.

This Website. Sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and collects nothing. It is a static site; GitHub records server logs as described above.

Article 3 — Purposes and legal basis

The Project uses the personal data it collects in order to improve the platform, to pursue the research goals of the Project, to acknowledge contributions, and to build a research community.

Where GDPR applies, the legal basis for processing account and contribution data is your consent, given when you register and when you submit; the legal basis for processing anonymous usage statistics and for publishing anonymised research data is the legitimate interest of the Project in carrying out and reporting scientific research. You may withdraw consent at any time, which does not affect the lawfulness of processing already carried out.

Personal data is not sold, is not used for advertising, and is not used for automated decision-making or profiling.

Article 4 — Publication and disclosure

Contributions are public by default. Publishing Contributions as open data (on Smapshot and through its Open Data API) is done by Smapshot, under its policy, as a condition of using the platform, not by the Project. Contribute anonymously if you would rather your Contributions not be linked to you.

Separately, the Project uses collected data for academic research: it may publish findings and datasets in anonymised form, under controlled access and with clear attribution. That research use is the Project’s responsibility and is what this document covers.

Where a Contributor is credited by username in a research output, dataset, or educational material, that credit is a disclosure of the username only, and is made in accordance with Article 13 below. A Contributor who prefers not to be credited may say so at any time, or may simply contribute anonymously.

Personal data is otherwise disclosed only to HEIG-VD as operator of the Platform, and to service providers acting on the Project’s instructions, each bound by obligations of security and confidentiality.

Article 5 — Transfers

The Project and HEIG-VD are both located in Switzerland.

Personal data received from the Platform is accessed by the Principal Investigator. Other members of the research team may be given access in future, for research purposes and on the same terms as this Policy sets out. Where access involves a transfer outside Switzerland or the European Economic Area, the Project ensures that an adequate level of protection is maintained, whether through an adequacy decision or through appropriate safeguards.

Article 6 — Retention

Account data is held by HEIG-VD, and its retention is governed by their data policy rather than by this one.

Contributions, once verified, form part of the research record and are retained indefinitely as research data. Where an account is deleted, Contributions already published through the Open Data API remain published, and the Project retains them in anonymised form. Anonymous usage statistics are retained indefinitely. Correspondence is retained for as long as needed to deal with the enquiry.

Article 7 — Your rights, and how to exercise them

You have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to withdraw consent, and to receive a copy of it in a portable format.

You may modify your personal data directly in your Platform account at smapshot.heig-vd.ch/backoffice. Requests to access, update, rectify, or delete personal data held on the Platform go to HEIG-VD at . For data held by the Project, write to ; the Project will forward anything it cannot action itself and will tell you when it has done so.

If you consider that your rights have not been respected, you may complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or, where GDPR applies, to the supervisory authority in your country of residence.

Deleting your account. Your account, and the deletion of it, are Smapshot’s, not the Project’s. Sign in to change your details, or email to request deletion; their data policy sets out how. If you would rather not approach them yourself, write to and the Project will pass the request on.

What deletion does not undo. Contributions already published as open data may have been copied, and deleting your account does not retract them. The Project retains verified Contributions in its research dataset in anonymised form. If this matters to you, contribute anonymously from the outset; that is the only step that is reliably reversible.

Part II Terms of Use The conditions on which you may use the Services. Articles 8–17.

Article 8 — Acceptance

These Terms of Use set forth the conditions under which you may access and use the Services and all the functionalities provided therein.

By accessing or using the Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Use. You represent and warrant that you have the ability and means required to access and use the Services, and you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and accepted, without limitation or reservation, these Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy above.

Please review these Terms of Use carefully before using the Services. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the Services.

These Terms of Use apply to you from your first access to the Services.

Article 9 — What these Terms cover

These Terms of Use govern the Website and the Project’s collection on the Platform. They do not replace HEIG-VD’s data policy, which governs the Platform itself and to which you also agree when you use Smapshot. Where the two conflict in respect of the Platform, HEIG-VD’s provisions prevail, and the Project’s obligations to you extend only as far as its own control over the Services reaches.

Article 10 — The Services

The Services allow you to view digitised ukiyo-e prints, to identify the viewpoint from which each depicted scene would have been seen, to align the depicted terrain with modern 3D terrain models, and to record observations about the relationship between the depiction and the underlying geography. Contributions are reviewed by the Project’s Principal Investigator before being incorporated into the research dataset, and feedback may be given by comment.

The Services are made available free of charge, excluding any connection costs, which depend on your electronic communications provider. It is your responsibility to have the hardware, software, browser configuration, and internet access required to use the Services, and to bear the cost of them.

Article 11 — Participation and accounts

No account is required. You may browse and contribute anonymously. An account lets you track your own contributions and receive feedback on them, but it is optional, and even when signed in you may choose to contribute anonymously.

Where you do create an account, it is created and held by HEIG-VD. You agree to provide accurate and complete information when creating or updating it, and to keep your login credentials confidential. You are responsible for activity carried out through your account. If you believe your account is being used by someone else, tell HEIG-VD at and the Project promptly.

No minimum age. The Project sets no age limit on participation. Anyone who can look carefully at a picture and a landscape is welcome, and a contributor who works anonymously provides no personal data to anyone. Registration is HEIG-VD’s, and their terms govern who may open an account.

Article 12 — Intellectual property: Collection Images, terrain, and Project Content

The Collection Images are not the property of the Project. Each is held by an institution which sets its own terms for it, and those terms differ from one another. The Project does not restate them here: restating another party’s licence is how a statement of it goes quietly out of date. The holding institutions are listed under About. Each institution’s own declaration is the authority on what may be done with its images.

Before reproducing, republishing, or otherwise reusing any Collection Image outside the Services, consult the declaration of the institution that holds it. The Project makes no representation and gives no warranty as to your right to reuse any Collection Image.

Every image in the collection is one the Project is entitled to make available: photographs are included only where they are out of copyright, and all other material has been integrated under terms that permit at least educational use. The holding institution’s declaration remains the authority on what you, in turn, may do with an image outside the Services.

Terrain data is supplied by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) and is subject to GSI’s terms of use.

Project Content belongs to the Project or its licensors and is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Services and Project Content for personal, non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

You may not use the name ThePrintLab, the name of the Project, or the marks or logos of the Project’s funders and partners without prior written permission.

Article 13 — Your Contributions

Contributions are not all of one kind, and rights in them do not all sit in one place.

Georeference data — camera position, orientation, and the point correspondences from which the Platform computes them — is measurement. It records where a viewpoint lies, and it is arrived at through the Platform’s mechanism operating on the points you identify. Copyright protects original expression, not facts, measurements, or results dictated by the function that produces them. The Project therefore does not treat georeference data as anyone’s literary property, and neither claims it nor asks you to give it up. It is data, and it is published as open data.

Written material — observations, research comments, and any recollections you choose to share — is different. It is expression, and it is yours. By submitting it, you grant the Project a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to reproduce, quote, and publish it for non-commercial research and educational purposes, with attribution to your username. You may withdraw this licence for future use at any time; material already published cannot be unpublished.

The assembled dataset — the collection of verified georeferences, the metadata around them, and the structure imposed on them — results from the investment of the Project and of HEIG-VD. Any rights subsisting in the compilation, as distinct from its contents, belong to them.

All Contributions submitted through the Platform are published by HEIG-VD on Smapshot and through the Smapshot Open Data API, and, as HEIG-VD’s data policy provides, may be used by partners in their research projects. The Project is such a partner, and its use rests on that publication.

Where you contribute while signed in and without selecting the anonymous option, you agree that the Project may credit you by username in research publications, datasets, presentations, and teaching materials. Credit already given in published work cannot be withdrawn; you may ask at any time not to be credited in future work, or contribute anonymously.

Publication through the Platform is governed by HEIG-VD’s data policy. The research dataset the Project derives and publishes from those Contributions carries its own licence, stated in the Project’s data repository.

You represent and warrant that you own the rights in your Contributions, or are licensed to submit them, and that they do not infringe the rights of any third party. You agree to indemnify and hold the Project harmless against claims by third parties arising from your Contributions.

Contributions are treated as non-confidential. Do not submit anything you are not willing to see published.

Article 14 — Rules of conduct

You must not submit, post, or distribute through the Services any content that is unlawful, defamatory, obscene, hateful, harassing, misleading, or that infringes the rights of any third party.

Personal information in Contributions. Contributions are published openly (Article 4). Share only what you are content to see published under your username or anonymously, and remember that open data is copied and cannot be recalled.

Contributions are for observations about the depiction and the terrain. Please do not submit personal recollections, or personal information about yourself or anyone else — and in particular do not submit health information, or information revealing religious, political, or philosophical beliefs, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation. The Project does not collect this material and has no basis to hold it. If you have a recollection of a place that bears on a Collection Image, the Project would be glad to hear it by email rather than through the Platform: .

You must not defame, stalk, bully, abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate, or intimidate any person through the Services.

You must not create an account by automated means, or use a script, bot, crawler, or scraper to submit Contributions. Automated submission defeats the purpose of the exercise, which is human observation.

You may make non-commercial use of the Services only. You must not probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of any system, interfere with security measures, or disrupt the operation of the Services.

Article 15 — Review, moderation, and removal

Every Contribution is reviewed by the Project’s Principal Investigator before being incorporated into the dataset. Verification may take time; a Contribution that does not appear on the map immediately has not been rejected. Where a Contribution needs correction, feedback is given by comment. Unsuccessful attempts are retained, since they are themselves evidence about which prints resist location.

The Project reserves the right, but assumes no obligation, to edit, remove, or decline any Contribution, and to suspend or terminate participation where these Terms of Use are breached. If you see content on the Services that you believe breaches these Terms, please write to with the date, a description of the content, and your reasons.

Article 16 — Disclaimers and liability

The Services and their content are provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, and in particular without any warranty that the material available through them is complete or accurate. The Project is a research project, not a reference work; the georeferences it publishes are scholarly interpretations, subject to revision, and are not authoritative statements of historical or geographical fact.

The Project is not responsible for your device, your internet connection, or any technical problem arising from either. The Project does not endorse any Contribution, and the views expressed by Contributors are their own.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the Project is not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising from your use of or inability to use the Services. No monetary cap is placed on the Project’s liability. Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud, wilful misconduct, or gross negligence.

Article 17 — External links

The Services link to websites operated by third parties. The Project does not endorse and accepts no responsibility for the content of those sites, and cannot be held liable for any damage arising from your use of them. A link does not imply affiliation.

Part III Provisions common to both These apply to the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use alike. Articles 18–22.

Article 18 — Contact

Questions about this document, whether about privacy or about the Terms, go to the address given under Contact at the top of this page. Questions about the Platform itself — your account, your login, deletion of data held there — go to HEIG-VD at .

Article 19 — Amendments

This document may be amended from time to time. The version published on this page takes precedence over all previous versions, and the date at the top records when it last changed. Amendments to the Terms of Use take effect when posted, and continued use of the Services after an amendment constitutes acceptance of it; if you do not accept an amendment, you may stop using the Services and delete your account under Article 7. Where a change materially affects how your personal data is used, the Project will say so on this page and, where it holds your address, by email.

Article 20 — Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms of Use are governed by the substantive law of Switzerland, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The ordinary courts of Zurich have jurisdiction over disputes arising from them.

Nothing in the preceding paragraph deprives you of the protection of provisions that cannot be derogated from by agreement under the law of the country where you habitually reside. Where you take part from a country whose mandatory rules give you rights these Terms do not, those rules apply and you may bring proceedings before the courts of your own country.

This choice of law governs these Terms of Use as a contract. It does not determine which data protection law applies to you: the applicable data protection regimes are named in Article 1 above and apply of their own force, whatever this Article says.

Article 21 — Governing language

In the event of any discrepancy between the English and Japanese texts of this document, the English text prevails.

Article 22 — Severability and survival

If any provision of these Terms of Use is held invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in effect.

Articles 12, 13, 16, and 20 to 22 survive the deletion of your account.