We had the great pleasure of presenting our research and the JVMG project at the 19. Deutschsprachigen Japanologentag at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main two weeks ago. The conference, held every three years, is a gathering place for researchers working on topics related to Japan and the Japanese language from a multitude of disciplines. We contributed to one of the joint panels of the information and resource science section, organized by Nobutake Kamiya and Cosima Wagner, and the media studies section, organized by Björn-Ole Kamm.
These two sections boasted a wide offering of topics, with presentations on the impacts of AI, examinations of the various aspects of the uses of specialist library resources and teaching literature research and referencing, updates on the CrossAsia platform, as well as spotlights on the WaDoku project, and an introduction of the VIAN video annotation and analysis tool. The open education resource project Comicforschung.nrw spanning four universities and offering a comprehensive resource for the teaching of comics studies was also very well received by the audience.
Some of the most interesting presentations for us were in the digital humanities and metadata panels (for our presentation in the latter see the slides below). Stephanie Santschi presented a citizen science platform for the crowd sourcing of the geolocating and landmark tagging of ukiyo-e images for a project aimed at determining just how realistic these depictions are from a topographical perspective. Nagasaki Kiyonori and Moe Takasuka discussed the challenges of expanding the TEI annotation system to be able to accommodate some of the unique features of Japanese text, and demonstrated its power on the example of annotating kusazōshi. This theme of digital tools and standards being too narrow in their scope and ultimately latin script centric took center stage once again in Cosima Wagner‘s presentation, „Disrupting digital monolingualism!“ on the challenges of handling non-latin script based metadata in libraries and digital catalogs.
We thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to discuss such a wide range of interesting topics and to reconnect with colleagues we know as well as to make new acquaintances within the domain of German language Japanese studies. We would like to express our gratitude to the organizers of the conference, as well as the organizers of the information and resource science and media studies sections, and, of course, all our colleagues in attendance for making this such a stimulating and welcoming event.
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