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Milestone: Public access to the knowledge graph

The project has reached an important milestone. The collected data from six sources is available in RDF and can be viewed on the mediagraph.link domain. Currently, only the transformed original data is available, as we are still working to complete the next step in the data integration process.

We would like to use this opportunity to thank all the enthusiast communities who make data available under a free license on the web and specifically the communities who kindly supported the project by attending our initial workshop, and exchanged ideas on data in the Japanese visual media domain with us. We are especially grateful to the communities who have agreed to offer us a specific open licence (detailed information is available here) for the parts of their data that have been integrated into our database.

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Tiny Use Case 5 Part II – Actual Co-Occurrence of Blood Type and Character Personality Traits

Part one of this blogpost introduced the research questions of our fifth tiny use case, which stem from the circulation of popular beliefs regarding blood type and temperament in Japan, and their potential influence on character design practices. The two questions were as follows:

  • Do these beliefs about the connection between blood type and personality translate into character designs, such as a correlation between blood type and specific personality traits/descriptors?
  • Does its representation in character data reflect popular beliefs circulating in Japan or does it differ?

We took our questions to two datasets, one coming from VNDB , another from ACDB .

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Tiny Use Case 5 Part I – Blood Type and Character Personality

Within Japanese visual media works, it is not unusual to find mentions of a character’s blood type within the work proper or within connected texts such as databooks, author interviews etc. In Japan blood type is widely believed to be a predictor of personality and temperament, each blood type corresponding to a set of temperaments, personality traits and quirks. The listing of a character’s blood can be found across multiple media types and franchises, with popular intellectual properties such as Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia all featuring information regarding a character’s blood type in one way or another. Do these beliefs about the connection between blood type and personality translate into character designs? Do these representations reflect popular beliefs circulating in Japan or do they differ? We took these questions to our data sources in our fifth tiny use case.

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Presence at upcoming conferences and workshops

We will be introducing our latest results at the following upcoming conferences and workshops. If you are interested in talking with a team member about our project, please feel free to contact us.

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Presenting at EAJS 2021

End of August we had the pleasure of presenting our latest work at the 16th International Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS 2021), hosted by Ghent University, but held online due to the ongoing pandemic situation. Being one of the most prominent conferences for Japanese Studies in Europe it featured a wide range of topics from linguistics, literature and art to history, anthropology and politics to media, education and more over four days of concurrent panels.

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Presenting at Mini-Elag 2021

We had the chance to present “Pubby”, our Front end for RDF-Data at Mini-Elag. It was an online conference, due to the ongoing pandemic situation. There were eleven interesting lighting talks, each between 5-10 minutes long. Elag is known for their conferences on the application of information technology in libraries and documentation centres. They discuss new technologies, to review on-going developments and to exchange best practices. We want to highlight a few of the talks we found particularly interesting.

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Exploring the JVMG knowledge graph

The JVMG project collects data from multiple sources and converts it into the RDF format. One of the core characteristics of this format is that all entities and attributes are represented as URIs, while the value of said attributes are either URIs (thus linking two entities using a property) or literal values.

The SPARQL language can then be used to formulate search queries on RDF stored in a database, but this requires the user to be both familiar with the query language as well as the structure of the RDF data.

As all entities and properties are identified by URIs, one way to explore RDF data is having a web server that serves the domain that the data URIs are residing in and shows all information that can be associated with a given URI.

This functionality is one of the main ideas of linked data: a linked data frontend can serve “raw” RDF data to programs that try to resolve an URI while human users using a browser to resolve the same URI get a human-readable HTML view of all the data that is associated with this URI.

Such a frontend also allows for simple exploration and navigation of a dataset, as all URIs in the human-readable view can be made into clickable links.

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Presenting at FanLIS 2021: Building Bridges

Even though we’ve had a string of awesome conference and workshop experiences over the past half a year, now that things have been slowly restarting after all the pandemic related cancellations and postponements, the FanLIS 2021 Symposium: Building Bridges has left us with a very special warm feeling and excited buzz. The enthusiasm, the positivity and the sense of community was so strongly expressed and felt that it was impossible to not get caught up in the excitement that acted as a constant backdrop to the excellent string of presentations.

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Tiny Use Case 4: Examining the concept of media mix by looking at networks of co-starring characters

Taking inspiration from the network representation of real-life actors co-staring in movies (see Bacon number) the central question for this Tiny Use Case (TUC) was can we find patterns in the networks of co-appearing characters that are specific to Japanese media mixes (explained below). The short answer is we couldn’t, but read on to learn about the interesting things we found in the process of trying.

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