The WIJA (Women in Japanese Animation) project, which started in 2024, aims to create a database of notable female creators working in the Japanese animation industry, and to explore gender representations in Japanese anime through the lens of the position of female creators involved in the production process of the examined works. The WIJA project page is now live, and you can follow all upcoming updates about the project there: for example, their series of posts on female pioneers in Japanese animation, so far featuring Kazuko Nakamura and Reiko Okuyama.
Continue readingPresenting at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen
– A short report by Saskia Dreßler –
The JVMG project was invited to give three presentations at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut) in Essen on March 25. Our visit took place as part of the Institute’s event series Guilty Pleasures and was coordinated by Ádám Havas. Under the overarching theme The Pleasures of Anime and Manga Fandom, Zoltan Kacsuk, Mathieu Mallard, and Saskia Dreßler presented excerpts of their research as well as the JVMG project itself.
Continue readingPresence at upcoming events, February-April 2025
We will be presenting in Dresden at DeDeCo 2025 on the weekend of February 21-23. We are very excited to be returning to the event after three years.
Then, on the 25th of March we will be presenting together with Mathieu Mallard on “The pleasures of Anime and Manga Fandom” as part of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen‘s Guilty Pleasures event series (thanks to the coordinating organizational work of Ádám Havas).
This will be followed by our presentation at the online leg of the Global Digital Humanities Symposium 2025 (April 2-4) organized by Michigan State University.
Finally, we will be presenting on the project at the Spring MondoCon 2025 (May 3-4) in Budapest.
New milestones in the GOLEM project, and new horizons for possible collaborations
We are very happy to report that our collaborators at the GOLEM project have been making huge strides towards their goal of creating a comprehensive knowledge graph to enable the large-scale quantitative exploration of stories, characters and events in fanfiction narratives.
Continue readingTiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part II – Defining the Kaiju Genre through Tropes
In a previous blog post, we introduced the research questions of our sixth tiny use case, presenting the kaiju genre as an interesting subject for examining kaiju-related tropes. In part II, we explore the consistency of the tropes attributed to live-action kaiju films via data-analytical methods.
For our analysis, we draw data from the fan-curated database TV Tropes. Our approach brings together two perspectives that have played only minor roles in film genre theory so far: The inclusion of the fan perspective, here based on the fan-curated database TV Tropes, and the focus on narratological tropes rather than the traditionally favored visual and sociocultural frameworks.
Continue reading “Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part II – Defining the Kaiju Genre through Tropes”Presenting at the Characters: Rights and Roles, International Workshop
June 25-26 saw the coming together of a host of researchers working on the cutting-edge of various aspects of characters for a super-intensive long-form workshop organized by Jaqueline Berndt at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University, the Characters: Rights and Roles, International Workshop. And we were fortunate enough to be there to witness the inspiring intensity of the talks and discussions, and to also contribute with our own experience from the JVMG project.
This event was one of those special occasions that are more like a true master-class on the state of the art of the topic woven together by all the participants through the constant discussions and cross-referencing of themes and questions, where the sum of the workshop became indeed more than just its individual parts, which in themselves were packed with so much detail – with an hour allotted for ample delivery and deliberation for each presenter – that this report can in no way do justice to them.
Continue readingPresenting at VisLang 2024
End of June we participated in the Visual Language Conference (VisLang) 2024 organized at Tilburg University by Neil Cohn‘s Visual Language Lab. The conference brought together a truly unique blend of cognitive science, linguistics, AI and comics research and much more, which made it an absolute treat to take part in.
Continue readingReport on the JVMG Manga Metadata Workshop
– A report by Saskia Dreßler –
In the last week of June we held a workshop at Stuttgart Media University on the various questions related to developing a manga metadata framework suited for manga research. We had participating researchers from Europe, Japan and even Latin America, all coming from different areas of the arts, humanities and digital humanities and dealing with the topic of manga from different angles. The aim of the workshop was to examine a range of manga research from the perspective of the type of metadata that would be required to facilitate such work as well as discuss the current state of available metadata frameworks and data for information on manga and its contents.
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Our article on the first steps in our cooperation with the GOLEM project is now available online
The article version of our presentation at FanLIS 2024: Building Bridges II on the first steps in our work together with the GOLEM project written together with Xiaoyan Yang and Federico Pianzola is now available open access in Volume 11 Issue 1 of the Proceedings from the Document Academy: Utilizing Metadata from Heterogeneous Sources within the Framework of the JVMG and GOLEM Projects to Identify Patterns in Anime-based Fandoms on AO3.
Presenting at DH Benelux 2024
Following on from our joint presentation at FanLIS 2024 about our work together with the GOLEM project last week we reunited with our colleagues from the Golem Lab once again – and this time in person – for presenting our work on developing data models for our respective knowledge graphs and aligning them at DH Benelux 2024: Breaking Silos, Connecting Data: Advancing Integration and Collaboration in Digital Humanities in Leuven.
