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.
The three-day (22-24.04.) program offered a large variety of activities from anime screenings, dance and game events and various craft workshops through cosplay and AMV competitions to presentations on a range of subjects related to Japan and Japanese visual media among other things. We were not the only ones presenting on academic research in relation to anime and manga: we had the pleasure of meeting Violetta Janzen from Heidelberg University, who presented on “Anime in der Wissenschaft” (Anime in science) and “Wissenschaftliche Anime-Fans? Diskussion zu Dekonstruktion in Puella Magi Madoka Magica” (Scientific Anime Fans? Discussion about Deconstruction in Puella Magi Madoka Magica). On our part, Magnus Pfeffer introduced the project on Friday in his presentation “Das Projekt ‘Japanese Visual Media Graph’”, and Zoltan Kacsuk explained one of our Tiny Use Cases on Saturday in “Eine ‘Volkszählung’ von Charakteren in japanischen visuellen Medien” (A ‘Census’ of Characters in Japanese Visual Media). We received some excellent questions and suggestions from the audience members and thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to talk to a community whose members were well versed in the specifics of the Japanese visual media domain.
The convention, of course, also featured a large number of vendors, and even a maid café, thanks to the team of Sweet Heaven, where we could relax with coffes, matcha lattes and cakes after our presentations. The maid café also featured a dedicated photo opportunity set up for guests to commemorate their visit, which we also did.
All in all, we very much enjoyed taking part in DeDeCo 2022, and we would like to thank both the organizers and the visitors who came to attend our presentations for making this such a great experience. We look forward to future opportunities to present our project and research results to the wider fan community.