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.
Continue reading “The JVMG-Project at the Workshop “Soundscapes of Storytelling. Music, Atmosphere, and Narrative in Studio Ghibli Films””The JVMG Symposium
End of February not only saw the second JVMG Lab taking place at Ritsumeikan University, but we also held a JVMG Symposium there subsequently to present and discuss the results of the second phase of the project as well as look towards its future.
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.
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.
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.
Second JVMG Lab in Kyoto
Following the success of the first JVMG Lab in Stuttgart we are happy to report that a second JVMG Lab has now also been held at the end of February in Kyoto at Ritsumeikan University with participants from various universities and institutions in Japan.
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.
In Memoriam Yoran Heling
It fills us with great sadness to have to write that a key community collaborator on our project, Yoran Heling, or Yorhel as he was known in the VNDB community, has left us with tragic suddenness. Yoran and the enthusiast community he formed with his website vndb.org have been an important and valued contributor to the JVMG project. We met him for the first time seven years ago at our inaugural project workshop in Leipzig, and we have been in contact with him since. We were so happy that Yoran was able to join us in Kyoto for our JVMG Lab and Symposium there this February. The picture below is from his presentation at the symposium event. The memory is still fresh and we find it difficult to think of him as someone who is no longer among us. Our sincere condolences go out to his family, friends and community on behalf of the JVMG project and all our project members past and present. Yoran was one of the few people who read this blog regularly, so in closing we would like to offer two older blogposts that feature him, one about the inaugural Leipzig 2019 event and one about the Stuttgart 2023 event where we also had the pleasure of having him join us.
First JVMG Lab in Stuttgart
The very first JVMG Lab event was held at Stuttgart Media University on November 20-21. We had twelve brave and curious participants join us from all across Europe and beyond to explore how the JVMG knowledge graph could be utilized for their research questions and interests.
Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part IV – Transcultural and Historical Data Analysis
In our previous tiny use cases, we examined the occurrence and co-occurrence of tropes in kaiju works within the TV Tropes community. The aim of these previous use cases was to examine the relationship of tropes to genre to find out how the kaiju genre is defined within fan communities and whether tropes are a reliable approach to define/understand a specific genre. In this tiny use case, we examine the potential of fan-databases, in this case TV Tropes, for transcultural and historical data analyses. Besides exploring the data provided, we also investigate how historical data (here: release dates) and cultural data (here: country of origin) about kaiju works are handled on TV Tropes and how to deal with incomplete data. Additionally, we examine how fan-curated data can contribute to a data analysis of the transculturality and history of the kaiju genre.
Continue reading “Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part IV – Transcultural and Historical Data Analysis”