Japanese Visual Media Graph

After two years of Corona we had the chance to visit ELAG in person. ELAG 2022 was held at the National Library of Latvia in Riga, which is a very impressive Library. ELAG is known for being a forum for exchanging knowledge about new library and archive technologies, as well as connecting people working in libraries.

The three-day 18. Deutschsprachiger Japanologentag (18th German Language Japanese Studies Day) organized by the Institut für Modernes Japan at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf was held online at the end of August. We are happy to report that the JVMG project was represented with two different presentations at this central triennial German language conference on Japanese Studies. Digital humanities and open science in Japanese Studies were both major topics at the conference, and it was great to see so many excellent projects and initiatives.

End of July we participated in the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which had been on hiatus for the past two years due to the pandemic. Digital Humanities 2022 Tokyo: Responding to Asian Diversity was organized by The University of Tokyo and took place completely online.

We were very happy to be able to participate at the Mechademia US conference, which took place on June 28 and June 29, 2022. Held at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. This year’s theme centered around ‘migration and transition’: movement of media follows in the wake of movements of persons, and is as much affected by forces similar, if not the same, as those precipitating the movement of people. Anime and manga, and their contiguous media forms, are subjected to similar forces, encountering tensions, and undergoing transitions as they continue to establish themselves as a global media. Conference presenters approached such phenomena from a multitude of perspectives, ranging from singular case studies to at-scale, survey-like approaches.   

End of May we were honored to present at the amazing VI Foro Internacional de Creación en la Frontera: Manga in a postdigital environment symposium showcasing so many cutting edge developments in relation to manga research in the broader sense. The symposium was held in Pontevedra and organized by the dx5 digital_&_graphic_art_research research group at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidade de Vigo.

Beyond the already posted upcoming conferences and events, we are very happy to report that we will be introducing the JVMG project at VI Foro Internacional de Creación en la Frontera: Manga in a postdigital environment, to be held May 30-31 in Pontevedra and organized by dx5 digital_&_graphic_art_research at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidade de Vigo.

The FanLIS Project at the Department of Library & Information Science at City, University of London is dedicated to bringing together fan studies and library information science. Their second symposium, FanLIS 2022: Fan Futures – Beyond the Archive took place last week online, and we are very happy to have been able to once again present our work here and participate in this amazing event.

Most of the time we are busy presenting our work on the JVMG project to various scholarly communities, and it is a rare chance to be able to talk about our work to the fans of Japanese visual media, whose work we ultimately rely on. Thus, we were happy to accept the invitation from the organizers of DeDeCo 2022 to present at their Manga/Anime/Japan-Fans targeted convention. The fact that this event marked the 10th anniversary of the DeDeCo convention series made the experience all the more special.