Our colleague, Luca Bruno‘s three-year-long term working on the JVMG project reached its finish at the end of May. He was involved with various aspects of the project that required domain knowledge about anime, manga, visual novel games and Japanese visual media in general.
Among other things, he developed and worked on three Tiny Use Cases, which he documented in a series of blog posts: one on eye shape as a predictor of character personality, another experimenting with a bottom up approach to understanding visual novel game character types, and finally one on the connection between the Japanese popular discourse on blood type and personality traits and its relation to the character data in the JVMG knowledge graph. His work on the first of these Tiny Use Cases was further developed into the chapter “A Glimpse of the Imaginative Environment: Exploring the Potential of Data-driven Examinations of Visual Novel Characters”, which was published in Japan’s Contemporary Media Culture between Local and Global: Content, Practice and Theory (2021).
Luca has also presented on his work at the Mechademia conference series both as a co-author in 2021, and individually in 2022 focusing on future directions of his work. He has also provided a detailed write-up of his conference experience at this latter Mechademia conference.
Beyond his work on Tiny Use Cases, Luca has also been actively involved in the work on data quality, providing valuable insights into the more obscure points in relation to rare releases, titles, reissues and so on. Furthermore, he not only participated in our work on checking data accuracy, but also spent the last stretch of his term on the project helping to compile a “complete list of anime”, which we hope to further develop and employ in checking data completeness.
We say thank you and farewell to Luca for now knowing that we can look forward to seeing him in the future at conferences and events, in new collaborations, and in our again and again criss-crossing paths of research. We would like to wish him all the best for the further development of his ongoing work on visual novel games and all other future research endeavors.