Author: kacsuk

End of June we participated in the Visual Language Conference (VisLang) 2024 organized at Tilburg University by Neil Cohn‘s Visual Language Lab. The conference brought together a truly unique blend of cognitive science, linguistics, AI and comics research and much more, which made it an absolute treat to take part in.

Following on from our joint presentation at FanLIS 2024 about our work together with the GOLEM project last week we reunited with our colleagues from the Golem Lab once again – and this time in person – for presenting our work on developing data models for our respective knowledge graphs and aligning them at DH Benelux 2024: Breaking Silos, Connecting Data: Advancing Integration and Collaboration in Digital Humanities in Leuven.

– A report by Saskia Dreßler –

The fourth installment in the FanLIS symposium series (see our reports on the first, second and third events) built a bridge between the subject areas of fan activities and AI as well as the connection between fan studies and information science. The symposium – organized by CityLIS – took place online on May 23rd and the presentations ranged from the application of AI in fan research to the use of data for research. All presentations, talks and the corresponding chat history are now available online. This year’s title was “Building Bridges II”. As Ludi Price, co-organizer of the event, explained in her opening address, AI can be used by fans as well as by researchers to evaluate fan data. In the area of fan documentation we can see the trend that fans are returning to traditional physical documentation, which was also discussed in one of the presentations. In addition to this new topic, another theme was revisited that had already been in the spotlight in 2021: the interaction of fan research, fan information practice and information science. Three years later, new insights can now be drawn, for example in the generation and use of metadata. The presentations were divided into two sections based on these two topic areas.

Two weeks ago on Saturday we had the honor of holding the opening and closing keynote presentations at the Taiwan Association for Animation, Comics and Games, Annual Conference 2024 at the National Chengchi University in Taipei.

Last Friday we had the pleasure of introducing the JVMG project in Hungarian to a packed room at the public presentation and discussion organized by the Communication and Media Studies Working Committee of the Pécs Regional Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (PABKOM) together with the Comics Studies Research Center (KTKK) at the University of Pécs. A short report by PABKOM can be found here. We would like to thank Zsolt Szijártó and Gyula Maksa for their kind invitation and hospitality. It was a wonderful opportunity to finally present on the JVMG to a Hungarian audience, and we look forward to potential future collaborations to come out of the many stimulating discussions that took place.

The Workshop on Metadata Models for Digital Archiving of Intangible and Experiential Cultural Entities organized by Shigeo Sugimoto took place on the 4th of December in Taipei at the International Forum on Data, Information, and Knowledge for Resilient and Trustworthy Digital Societies (IFDIK 2023). IFDIK 2023 brought together three major conferences: the 25th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2023), the 11th Asia-Pacific Conference on Library Information Education and Practice (A-LIEP 2023) and the AP-iConference 2023 (the annual meeting of Asia-Pacific chapter of iSchools, AP-iSchools).

We were very happy to be able to participate in this specialist workshop focusing on some of the immediate concerns of the JVMG project, namely discussing “digital archiving and metadata issues for various cultural entities in new domains, such as intangible cultural heritage, video games, animations, comics (Manga), performing arts, social events, and disasters.”¹