– A report by Saskia Dreßler –
In the last week of June we held a workshop at Stuttgart Media University on the various questions related to developing a manga metadata framework suited for manga research. We had participating researchers from Europe, Japan and even Latin America, all coming from different areas of the arts, humanities and digital humanities and dealing with the topic of manga from different angles. The aim of the workshop was to examine a range of manga research from the perspective of the type of metadata that would be required to facilitate such work as well as discuss the current state of available metadata frameworks and data for information on manga and its contents.
MangaMetadataWorkshop_posterThere were four presentations in total and a final discussion. In the first presentation Tetsuya Mihara (University of Tsukuba) talked about the Media Arts Database (MADB), on which he has been working since 2013, and the types of metadata that are needed to describe manga. The MADB is a Japanese online database on manga, anime, games and media arts. First, Tetsuya Mihara showed how information is structured in manga and that the metadata can be collected on different levels (dialogue, characters, etc.). The MADB data model for manga (as well as for its other domains) combines collecting metadata on both the content level – similar to, for example, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) – and the item level, which describes the individual physical objects, such as magazines, tankōbons, etc. The presentation made it clear that further integration of more media into the MADB is desired and that work is being done to expand the international scope of the database (e.g. on the availability of manga titles in different languages). Tetsuya Mihara also made it clear that AI can help in the automatic creation of metadata about manga – but that there is still a need for development here, because despite the fact that so far AI can identify texts and objects in images and search in texts and images, to better support metadata retrieval, the AI would need to better recognize the concepts that are processed in the image-text combination of the manga. The JVMG project is already working together with the MADB and further cooperation is being explored and deepened in various areas.
Stuttgart_MM-WS_20240630In the second presentation, Dalma Kálovics (Kwansai Gakuin University) gave various insights into her current research work. The main focus of her investigation are the different formats in which manga can be published and the impact of these formats on the layout and paneling of the works. This includes, for example, the difference between the various publication formats (e.g. A5 rental manga or B5 manga magazine) and how the transfer from one size format to another affects the image composition. Something similar happens in the translation between webtoons and printed manga. The origin of the webtoons from Korea also affects the transfer in terms of the reading direction, panel size and design of the printed manga. In this area, the reading direction of the manga is also changing. This is also another research area that was presented, because especially in the post-war period there were no clear rules about the reading direction in which the panels should be arranged. For this reason, there is both a horizontal and a vertical reading direction. The presentation showed that there is great research potential in the translation of printed manga into online formats (and vice-versa).
José Andrés Santiago Iglesias (University of Vigo) spoke about online manga in his presentation. He distinguished between three types of digital manga. Only two of which are “born digital” – meaning that the manga are planned as digital publications from the outset. “Digi-manga” are originally physical media that were then transferred to digital media. “Webmanga” are planned for digital publication and thus follow different conventions. Finally, “e-manga” are published digitally, but aim to imitate a physical publication using special means. (For further details on this typology see: José Andrés Santiago Iglesias, 2021. La revolución silenciosa. Transformaciones estéticas para un manga postdigital. In: Antonio Loriguillo-López, ed. Estudios sobre cultura visual japonesa: videojuegos, manga y anime. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, Centro de Estudios e Investigación sobre Asia Oriental, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 83-100.) The differences between these types of manga publications were shown using the manga “Kaiju No. 8” and “One Punch Man” as examples. The discussed topics and examples dovetailed very nicely with Dalma Kálovics’ presentation and it became clear that digital manga publications as a field of research have different possible approaches.
In the last presentation for this workshop, Diego Labra (University of Hamburg) reported on the research results of his doctoral thesis. Among other things, he investigated how manga came to Argentina as a global phenomenon and what effects this had on the comics market there. There are various ways in which manga came to Argentina and in the first wave the publications were primarily fan translations until the first publishers came along who had manga licenses. After that, the field of manga publications opened up and manga magazines were created based on the Japanese model. The presentation further showed that the emergence of manga also impacted Argentinian graphic novels and that artists borrowed narrative methods, drawing styles and the like from manga and thus developed their own style. Manga is therefore not a purely Japanese phenomenon, but can be viewed in the context of globalization. It will be exciting to see how the development of manga has progressed in other countries.
Finally, various possible manga fan databases were discussed, the potential future integration of which requires a more detailed analysis. We ended the workshop with a joint discussion of the many topics raised in the presentations.
At the end of this one-day workshop, everyone was inspired by the further possibilities for research, cooperation and the potential future expansion of the JVMG. It became clear that the field of manga research is broad and that there are many approaches to dealing with this topic. The JVMG can provide a good basis and support for various research approaches. We are very grateful to all the workshop participants for their contributions and we sincerely hope that we can continue the dialogue initiated at this event in the coming years.