The Mechademia conference series (in association with the Mechademia journal) is definitely one of the most important English language annual events for researchers working on anime, manga, otaku culture and related topics. Last year our former project member Luca Bruno presented at the Mechademia US conference (see his report here), and the year before that we introduced the JVMG project at the online Mechademia Kyoto conference (you can read our report here). This year’s conference, titled Mechademia Kyoto 2023: Aftermath, was held once again in Kyoto, hosted by the Kyoto International Manga Museum and Kyoto Seika University, between May 27-29, and it was a huge success with not only the program packed full of presentations on all aspects of the field but also the rooms overflowing with record visitor numbers.
There were, in fact, so many amazing presentations – not to mention the fantastic keynote speech Calling Manga “Manga”: Media Specificity via Sub/Cultural Particularization in large part on Taiwanese manga/manhua/comics and the many core questions they make visible in relation to manga research by Professor Jaqueline Berndt – we would not be able to cover them all here, so we will focus only on our own panel for this blogpost. The whole program with all the presenters and their presentations can be found here.
Our panel, Digital Humanities and Anime Studies, ended up consisting of only two presentations, which left ample time for a real questions and answers session. Our presentation titled The impossible quest for the complete list of all anime by Magnus Pfeffer, Zoltan Kacsuk and Martin Roth together with Hideyuki Ōtsubo – who is the Executive Director of the Japan Animation Creators Association (JAniCA), and also represents the Non-Profit Organization Anime Tokusatsu Archive Centre (ATAC), as well as the anime data collection leg of the Media Arts Database (MADB) – was the first in the panel. The slides for our presentation can be found below, and the accompanying text is available here. The second presentation was Japanese studies after scouring databases: aftermaths of data-driven approaches by Luca Bruno, in which he first compared two online fan compiled databases, and then went on to point out the various difficulties that await researchers who would like to systematically engage with information on archived dōjin works. For example, visiting the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library, he found that dōjin works from Comiket were ordered in the library catalog not according to the producing circles’ names but rather based on the order of the tables/booths at the given Comiket event. Furthermore, his random sample of dōjin works turned up an amazing heterogeneity of works, from role playing game rulebooks, through postcards, to playing cards and so on, which will make cataloging these works again all the more difficult.
Pfeffer_et_al_Mechademia_Kyoto_2023The Mechademia Kyoto 2023: Aftermath conference was an amazing three days, with lots of stimulating exchange among the many researchers working on the fields of anime, manga, otaku culture and so on. We would like to thank all the conference organizers, the volunteers and the Mechademia organization for making this wonderful event possible, and we eagerly look forward to the next Mechademia conference!