Project Website
– A short report by Saskia Dreßler –
On Tuesday, October 21 the Japanese Visual Media Graph (JVMG) Project had the wonderful opportunity to present its research and ongoing work at a special seminar event organized by Alba Torrents González at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The event featured four presentations (in-person and online) that introduced the aims, structure, and methodologies of the JVMG.
Continue readingWe will be introducing the Japanese Visual Media Graph project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona on the 21st of October (see poster below). Furthermore, Magnus Pfeffer will be at the 2025 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Conference (DCMI): Meta(data) at the Core: Bridging Human Knowledge and AI Innovation to be held in Barcelona Oct 19-25.
We are pleased to announce that the proceedings of the FanLIS Symposium are now available online. This year’s symposium, held in May, marked its fifth anniversary and therefore featured a broad range of topics intended to reflect the diversity of research conducted in recent years. Further information on the individual presentations can be found in the blog post covering the event.
Continue readingThe beautiful VinLOD Saga project was created by Ilaria De Dominicis and Regina Manyara, both students at the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge Master’s program at the University of Bologna. The project connects real-world cultural heritage objects – such as the painting by Christian Krohg below – with the popular manga (also adapted into anime) Vinland Saga in linked data form. Among the various metadata standards used in the project, the manga and anime objects were in part modeled using the JVMG ontology and the RDF ontology created for the AnimeClick subgraph in the JVMG. The project website is not only visually appealing, but also full of details regarding the data modelling decisions with large-scale diagrams of the final model, and even includes the annotated digital text versions of two of the interlinked cultural heritage objects.
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.
Continue readingReturning from the summer break we will be once again in part on the road presenting our work and various results of the project at a number of events in August and September.
As already briefly mentioned in our last announcement, we will be taking part in the 19. Deutschsprachigen Japanologentag to be held at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main between the 20-22nd of August with two presentations. Christopher Zysik will be presenting on the topic of „Girls-Metal-Band-Boom“ und die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen im transkulturellen Kontext, and Martin Roth and Zoltan Kacsuk will be talking about Metadatenanalyse als Methode für die japanbezogene Medienforschung.
Then, Christopher Zysik and Martin Hennig will be at the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft Annual Conference in Paderborn September 16-19, and present their work with the title Macht in fankuratierten Datenbanken.
Finally, Martin Roth and Zoltan Kacsuk’s presentation The Impact of Datascapes on Metadata Analytics, illustrated by the Virtual Census of Characters in the Japanese Visual Media Graph will be representing the project at the The 4th EAJS (European Association for Japanese Studies) Japan Conference organized at Tohoku University and to be held September 20-21.
Last weekend and Monday (June 7-9) saw the JVMG team represent the project at one of the most highly anticipated events for us, the Mechademia 2025 conference in Kyoto with a whole panel on some of the new results of the second phase. Taking place once again at Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum the conference was even bigger than two years ago, with multiple parallel panels running throughout the three days and more than a hundred and fifty presenters from all over the world. Furthermore, for the first time the conference featured both English and Japanese as official languages of the event, allowing for an even more inclusive exchange of ideas around researching anime, manga, video games and related fields of Japanese popular culture.
We are very happy to report that the latest issue of Mechademia (Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2025) – the premier English language journal on anime and manga studies and related fields – titled Methodologies and edited by Jaqueline Berndt is now available open access online. The issue contains an article by Martin Roth and Zoltan Kacsuk, Introducing Metadata Analytics: Harnessing the Power of Data from Online Fan Communities for Research on Japanese Popular Visual Media, which explains in detail the methodological underpinnings of the type of research the JVMG project aims to further.
– A report by Saskia Dreßler –
This year marked the fifth anniversary of the FanLIS symposium series (see our reports on the first, second, third and fourth events), a conference dedicated to exploring the intersection of fan studies and library and information science (LIS). The event returned on May 22, 2025, once again in an online format that continues to provide broad and accessible participation. All presentations, talks and the corresponding chat history will be available online soon.
Continue readingThe publication of Martin Roth‘s monograph Unboxing Japanese Videogames: A Metadata-Based Approach to the Production and Distribution of Spatial Instability (MIT Press, 2025) is a huge milestone for metadata analytics based research and a very timely contribution to Japanese video game research. The book is the culmination of the work undertaken in the diggr project, which was the precursor project of the JVMG, and which is a constant reference point and source of inspiration in our current work. The paperback edition is available from the MIT Press Bookstore as well as various other vendors, and the pdf version is open access and available for download online.
