The very first JVMG Lab event was held at Stuttgart Media University on November 20-21. We had twelve brave and curious participants join us from all across Europe and beyond to explore how the JVMG knowledge graph could be utilized for their research questions and interests.
The JVMG Lab revolved around each participant working on an individual mini-TUC (Tiny Use Case) related to their own research interests and utilizing data from the JVMG knowledge graph. Following a short round of introductions, a brief walk-through of the new features of the JVMG frontend, and some pointers for working with tabular data in spreadsheet software, the race against the clock was on to explore and analyze the data to then create a final presentation of the results of the mini-TUC.
The whole JVMG team was present to offer constant guidance and help, as well as provide further data and post-processing when required. Martin Roth joined us via Zoom from Kyoto staying up late into the night to offer one-on-one guidance for participants working with network analysis and Gephi. Tobias Malmsheimer, who had already moved to Mannheim University of Applied Sciences by the time of the event (more on this in a separate blogpost), and who had been responsible for the development of the JVMG frontend as well as most of our IT infrastructure, came back to join us for the two days lending much needed support. Furthermore, we also had Hjordis Lindeboom join us representing the University Library of Tübingen, who also actively contributed to solving data issues and requests.
The one and a half days of intensive work on the Tiny Use Cases flew by rapidly, with participants so immersed in their work that they had to be nudged to take breaks during the second day (it really did feel like a hackathon). The final presentations at the end of the lab event were a resounding success. We will very briefly introduce the topics that each participant was working on – in the order they presented at the end – to showcase just how diverse and creative the various approaches and mini-TUCs were.
Violetta Janzen from the Department of Modern Japanese Studies at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf explored anime that deal in some way with war, examining the distribution of genres and media formats of these works as well as the traits of characters therein.
Billy Tringali from the University Library of Indiana University Indianapolis and editor-in-chief of Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) went in search of the most typical vampire characters in anime and visual novels, and provided an in-depth description of all of them according to various dimensions.
Cosima Wagner from the University Library of the Freie Universität Berlin as well as the Multilingual Digital Humanities working group of the Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries (DHd) association explored anime data that feature robot characters and questions regarding the gender of such characters; but even more importantly offered us much needed feedback from the perspective of a research data management librarian actively promoting data work among researchers in the field of Japanese studies and beyond – directing our attention, for example, towards the work of Alkemade et al. (2025) on Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage Datasets (Version 2).
Valentina-Andrada Minea from the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Münster and the University of Bucharest explored various animal characters from anime and visual novels as well as their connection to different genres and dere types (such as tsundere, yandere and so on), contextualizing her findings in a network analysis of Web of Science publications on anime.
Lukas R.A. Wilde from the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology explored the structure of trope indices from TV Tropes with the help of network analysis and Gephi attempting to identify the underlying themes behind the major modularity groups (clusters of nodes) found in the network of indices.
José Andrés Santiago Iglesias from the research group dx5 digital_&_graphic_art_research at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidade de Vigo explored data on isekai works from the vantage point of his ongoing collaboration with historian colleagues from the University of Murcia focusing on neo-medieval manga and anime narratives.
Xiaoyan Yang from the GOLEM project at the University of Groningen investigated the potential for using character data from the JVMG knowledge graph in conjunction with the fanfiction data in the GOLEM database to better understand the evolution of fanfiction over time through the case study of Bungo Stray Dogs in what is hopefully the first step of a more extensive collaborative investigation.
Xiaoyu Zhou from the Center for Language and Cognition as well as the GOLEM project at the University of Groningen examined the possibility of using the available data on webtoons from the JVMG knowledge graph to better contextualize her ongoing work on the webtoon Lore Olympus setting up for a broader computational analysis of narratives in the infinite canvas format.
Regina Wanjiru Kemunto Manyara from the University of Bologna, one of the creators of the VinLOD Saga project, which we have recently featured here on our research blog, examined the way the VinLOD knowledge graph could be further integrated with the JVMG in a tiny use case focusing on the level of ontologies.
Oscar García Aranda from the Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asia Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who undertook a short research stay with us in 2023 (see his write-up of his work back then), continued his exploration of the developments in the design and features of anime characters this time focusing in on the period of 1995-2000 and the changes in eye color, hair color and hairstyles.
Shixia Luo from the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, who is currently a visiting researcher at the heiSKILLS Competence and Language Centre at Heidelberg University examined the media art exhibition and performance data from MADB by creating a visualization of the spatial distribution of these events over time in Japan.
Mathieu Mallard from the Centre de Recherche sur les Expertises, les Arts et les Transitions at Université de Lorraine, who also undertook a short research stay with us earlier this year continued his work on the social history of the Japanese animation industry between 1956-1973 by exploring the available credits information for the period in the JVMG knowledge graph in Gephi and further enriching it with his own collected data on creators.
Such brief snapshots of these tiny use cases cannot convey just how rich and deep the work that the participants managed to undertake in the available short time was. However, we hope that the above was able to demonstrate just how diverse the ways in which the data was approached, utilized, connected, contextualized and enhanced were. We would once again like to thank all the participants for their sincere enthusiasm and hard work during the event, and we hope everyone learnt as much from this experiment, as we did, and we look forward to the on-going development of these diverse and very promising research directions.