Japanese Visual Media Graph – Project Website

13. September 2023

Upcoming workshop participations, 2023 September-December

During the current autumn semester we will be taking part in the following two upcoming workshops:

Estudios de Anime. Del objeto a las humanidades digitales. (Anime studies. From the object to the digital humanities.) Organized by the research group dx5 digital_&_graphic_art_research at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidade de Vigo. The workshop will take place in Pontevedra on September 15.

On the 4th of December we will be at the Workshop on Metadata Models for Digital Archiving of Intangible and Experiential Cultural Entities, which will be held at The 25th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2023) as a part of the International Forum on Data, Information, and Knowledge for Resilient and Trustworthy Digital Societies (IFDIK 2023) which will be taking place December 4 to 7 in Taipei.

4. September 20233. September 2023

Poster presentation at GrapHNR 2023

The last event we participated in before our summer break end of July was GrapHNR 2023: Graphs and Networks in the fourth dimension – time and temporality as categories of connectedness, which was a joint conference of the Historical Network Research community and Graphs & Networks in the Humanities. And it proved to be a real summer firework display of amazing research as well as wonderful software projects, with a very international and highly engaged line-up of speakers and guests.

The whole four-day program can be found here. Due to the length of the program, we will only concentrate on highlighting some of the main points from the opening and closing keynote presentations here, which were both very inspiring and an absolute treat. Our own poster presentation by Magnus Pfeffer and Tobias Malmsheimer on the JVMG frontend can be found at the end of this blogpost.

17. July 2023

Presenting at the Ontologies for Narrative and Fiction workshop

The first week of July we were in Groningen to join Federico Pianzola and the GOLEM team at the University of Groningen for a hybrid workshop on Ontologies for Narrative and Fiction (in cooperation with the Center for Language and Cognition, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI). This workshop was a very special event bringing together an amazing spectrum of expertise and experience with modelling themes, genres, narratives and characters in fiction using an array of approaches from BFO, CIDOC-CRM/FRBRoo/LRMoo, the Wikibase data model, Schema.org, custom bottom-up models and so on, as well as with exploring the potential interoperability of these models. All the presentation slides are now available on the workshop’s page.

6. July 2023

Visiting the Archive Center for Anime Studies

Beginning of June we visited the Archive Center for Anime Studies at the Asian Link Research Center, Niigata University, and met with lead researchers Minori Ishida and Joon Yang Kim. The archive currently houses two collections (the Watanabe Collection and the Takeda Collection) of intermediate production materials – such as storyboards, animation cels, background images, etc. – used in the creation of animation works.

22. June 2023

Project funding is extended by another 36 months

The Japanese Visual Media Graph project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The first grant was for a period of 36 months and the funding program allows for a second grant to continue the project.

We applied for the continuation grant in 2022 and in early June 2023, we received the notice of approval. The reviewers lauded the project idea and the results of the first project phase.

20. June 2023

Presenting at Mechademia Kyoto 2023: Aftermath

The Mechademia conference series (in association with the Mechademia journal) is definitely one of the most important English language annual events for researchers working on anime, manga, otaku culture and related topics. Last year our former project member Luca Bruno presented at the Mechademia US conference (see his report here), and the year before that we introduced the JVMG project at the online Mechademia Kyoto conference (you can read our report here). This year’s conference, titled Mechademia Kyoto 2023: Aftermath, was held once again in Kyoto, hosted by the Kyoto International Manga Museum and Kyoto Seika University, between May 27-29, and it was a huge success with not only the program packed full of presentations on all aspects of the field but also the rooms overflowing with record visitor numbers.

13. June 202313. June 2023

Report on FanLIS 2023: Halliday Journals and holodecks: audiences and information in sci-fi fandoms

This year saw the third installment of the FanLIS symposium series (see our reports on the first and second event) – organized by CityLIS – take place on the 18^th of May, once again online. All talks and the corresponding chat history are now available online. This year’s title and theme was Halliday Journals and holodecks: audiences and information in sci-fi fandoms. As Ludi Price, co-organizer of the event, explained in her opening address the theme of SF is quite central to the intersection of fan studies and library and information science for a number of reasons. First of all, SF is one of the most important genres for the development of organized fandom as we know it today. Second, the roots of fan information behaviour can also be traced to the genre and the beginnings of fanzin culture. Third, SF is an important domain for the historicizing of fandom. For example, in The Comet, the first SF fanzine, we can see how the modern fan world began to take shape. Fourth, SF works also hold up a mirror to how we conceptualize information needs: are librarians needed in the far future?, after the apocalypse?, or once information access becomes omnipresent? Will information be savoured or so interwoven with our everyday ways of operation that it will no longer be visible as a result of being taken for granted. Fifth, fans have also been at the forefront of appropriating new technologies for fan activities and information provision activities and in this way are always representatives of the near future SF that is just around the corner.

5. June 2023

A Tiny Use Case approach to a preliminary overview of formal and stylistic transformations of character designs between the 1990s and 2000s

This is a guest post written by Oscar García Aranda, who is currently a PhD Candidate and pre-doctoral researcher in the Department of Translation, Interpretation and East Asian Studies of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and who undertook a short research stay at the JVMG project with us in Stuttgart to work on further developing his dissertation research.

4. May 202313. May 2023

Presence at upcoming conferences and events, 2023 May-July

Members of the JVMG team will be presenting at or attending the following upcoming conferences, workshops and other events:

21. February 202321. February 2023

JVMG Project Phase One Wrap-Up Workshop

Last week of January we had a fantastic experience hosting the JVMG project phase one wrap-up workshop at Stuttgart Media University with an amazing line-up of collaborators and supporters, some of whom have already contributed to the success of the project over the past three and a half years and others who we are hoping to work and collaborate with going forward. But what made this workshop so special was the lively dialogue between so many different backgrounds and interests, from the representatives of the online enthusiast communities, through academic research librarians, developers and researchers working on various digital humanities and large scale database projects in musicology, literary and fan studies and Japanese media, to researchers from game and media studies, anime and manga research, Japanese studies and even law, from all across Europe, Japan and even North America.