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Presenting at Mechademia 2026

As a first for Mechademia, the conference was not held in Japan or the USA, but this time in Singapore. A big thank you to Deborah Shamoon and the local team at the National University of Singapore for organizing the event.

The keynote presentation was held by Chua Beng Huat, currently professor emeritus at NUS. Titled “Approaches to Study of Pop culture in Asia”, he explored the ongoing changes in an increasingly transnational popular culture and the consequences for a field that used to call itself “Asian pop culture”. The discussion went from the definition of the field, its research methods and its visions for research beyond detailed analysis of – in his words “essentially ephemeral commercial products of pop culture.” He finished his presentation with a call to action for researchers to be aware of the options that analysis of large datasets offers in their field and that research without a broader outlook backed by “big data” will become increasingly irrelevant. This was a strong sentiment, and as researchers who are building an infrastructure for data-driven research we were very happy to hear it.

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The JVMG-Project at the Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium

Set between the Culture Futures Lab’s “Hacking the Asian Waves” and Mechademia 2026, we had the opportunity to attend the Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium on May 28 at the National University of Singapore. The symposium was organized by Bertha Chin, Michelle Ho, and Weiyu Zhang. Two packed parallel sessions provided broad and rich insights into contemporary fan studies within the Southeast and East Asian research communities. The plenary session featuring Anthony Fung (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Lori Morimoto (Temple University Japan), and Wikanda Promkhuntong (Mahidol University) provided a more casual and personal, yet still serious, discussion on the directions and futures of transcultural fandoms in East and Southeast Asia.

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The JVMG-Project at the Workshop “Soundscapes of Storytelling. Music, Atmosphere, and Narrative in Studio Ghibli Films”

Between April 17 to April 19, we had the great pleasure of presenting the JVMG-Project at the “Soundscapes of Storytelling. Music, Atmosphere, and Narrative in Studio Ghibli Films”-Workshop at the HMT Leipzig. Organized by Christoph Hust, Professor for Music at the HMT Leipzig, the program featured a thematically diverse range of topics and perspectives on the music in Studio Ghibli Films: from rural and urban imaginaries, nostalgia, and instrumentations, over aesthetics, atmospheres, and the tension between the West and Japan, to contexts and fan-reception. This led to rich discussions and exchange of perspectives and ideas in a supportive and appreciative setting.

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Announcing the Hacking the Asian Waves event

We are excited to announce that we will be participating in the second Culture Futures Incubator: Experimenting with VR, AI & data tools for speculative prototyping event of the Culture Futures Lab at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore titled Hacking the Asian Waves: Shaping Cultural Flows in the Global Cultural Imagination organized by Natalia Grincheva.

The event will feature three sprints alongside each other. Sprint one will be Where Dragons Wander. Remediating Chinese Motifs through VR led by Benedict Yu & Amber Yin. Sprint two is going to be Will the Korean Wave Crash? Traversing (Anti-) Hallyu Geographies headed by Natalia Grincheva. And third, our collaboration with Sheuo Hui Gan – adding a large-scale data view to her theoretical framework of the visual clash – will be the sprint Visual Clash: Remaking the Everyday through Anime’s Grammar led by Sheuo Hui Gan, Magnus Pfeffer & Zoltan Kacsuk.

The event will take place on the 26th of May at LASALLE College of the Arts, UAS, and is free to attend, but pre-registration is required, so please register here to take part.

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Data from the Game Preservation Society added to the JVMG knowledge graph

We are delighted to announce that following our recent visit at the Game Preservation Society‘s (GPS) head office, we have now added their data to the JVMG knowledge graph. This collaboration was made easy thanks to the GPS already offering an RDF version of the metadata from their online catalog under the very permissive and open CC0 license. A big thank you to Joseph Redon for making some adjustments to their RDF data as well as preparing the GPS ontology file to enable an almost seamless integration of their data. You can now see the entities and their numbers for their subgraph on our overview page, search and browse their data on our frontend, and also find the GPS listed among our data sources. We are excited to see what researchers working on old Japanese computer games will explore with the help of this new dataset in the JVMG knowledge graph.

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The HARC Oral History Collection

Thanks to the kind invitation of Shigeo Sugimoto we had the pleasure of participating in the Second Kyoto Informal Gathering on Researching the Archiving of Media Art (hosted this time by the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University). This is where we had the wonderful opportunity to talk to Koichi Hosoi, the director of the History of Content Industry Archives Research Center (HARC) at ZEN University and learn about their on-going projects. One of these projects at HARC is their Oral History Collection focusing on key figures from various business, development and creator roles in the Japanese content industries (ranging from anime and manga to IT development and internet culture). With new videos constantly being added to the collection this is an amazing resource even for researchers outside of Japan as all the interviews have publicly available versions online. Furthermore, all interviews come with added Japanese transcripts (in text form separate from the videos) making working with the materials even more researcher friendly.

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Visiting the Game Preservation Society

Thanks to Andrea Mariucci we had an opportunity to visit the central office and main archive of the Game Preservation Society (GPS), where we were introduced to the society’s work by its founder and president, Joseph Redon. The GPS is a nonprofit organization that aims to archive, digitize and catalog the rich history of games created in Japan, prioritizing the preservation of the currently rapidly disappearing slice of this story from the eighties. Their expertise in hardware restoration and emulation along with their capabilities of near-forensic recovery of data from even mold-damaged old floppy discs and other media coupled with their commitment to exhaustively detailed cataloging and careful archiving practices position them as a premier source of ground truth for anyone conducting research on video games produced in Japan from this era. The GPS Game Catalog is available to browse online with their individual entries linked to MADB and also available in RDF format.