Even though we’ve had a string of awesome conference and workshop experiences over the past half a year, now that things have been slowly restarting after all the pandemic related cancellations and postponements, the FanLIS 2021 Symposium: Building Bridges has left us with a very special warm feeling and excited buzz. The enthusiasm, the positivity and the sense of community was so strongly expressed and felt that it was impossible to not get caught up in the excitement that acted as a constant backdrop to the excellent string of presentations.
Continue readingTiny Use Case 4: Examining the concept of media mix by looking at networks of co-starring characters
Taking inspiration from the network representation of real-life actors co-staring in movies (see Bacon number) the central question for this Tiny Use Case (TUC) was can we find patterns in the networks of co-appearing characters that are specific to Japanese media mixes (explained below). The short answer is we couldn’t, but read on to learn about the interesting things we found in the process of trying.
Continue readingTaking part in the “Pimp your publication” workshop
On the 9th of April we had the pleasure of participating in the Pimp your publication: Potenzielle Einsatzszenarien von Graphentechnologien im digitalen Publizieren workshop co-organized by the two working groups Graphen & Netzwerke and Digitales Publizieren of the Verbandes Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum.
Continue readingInformation Commons for Manga, Anime and Video Games, first meeting
We are very happy to report that we held the first Information Commons for Manga, Anime and Video Games meeting on the 12th of March. The participants of the meeting were present and former colleagues from the Ritsumeikan University Center for Game Studies in Kyoto working on the datasets for the Japanese Media Arts Database, members of the startup Animeshon from South Tyrol, and, of course, everyone from the JVMG project.
Continue readingPresenting at JADH2020
The 10th annual conference of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, JADH2020: “A New Decade in Digital Scholarship: Microcosms and Hubs” hosted by the Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University took place in virtual space this last weekend (20-22 November 2020).
Continue reading “Presenting at JADH2020”Tiny Use Case 2: Can we test one of the points from Hiroki Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” with the JVMG database? Part 5: Summary and lessons learned
Here we are, finally done with our series on Tiny Use Case 2, so let’s do a quick TL;DR summary of what happened in the four preceding blogposts (1, 2, 3, 4):
continue readingTiny Use Case 2: Can we test one of the points from Hiroki Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” with the JVMG database? Part 4: Questions of validity and the theoretical implications of our results
It has been quite a journey getting to this fourth part in our series on Tiny Use Case 2. We started out by introducing Hiroki Azuma’s discourse defining work, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, and picking out a claim that would be worth examining on the JVMG database. Next we introduced the two datasets (The Visual Novel Database (VNDB) and Anime Characters Database (ACDB)) we were employing for our analysis, and examined some key descriptive statistics. Finally, in part three we employed the toolkit of regression analysis to see whether our two hypotheses are confirmed or contradicted by the data at our disposal. Our hypotheses were:
continue readingTiny Use Case 2: Can we test one of the points from Hiroki Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” with the JVMG database? Part 3: Regression analysis
Following the first part of this series, where we introduced Hiroki Azuma’s seminal book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, and identified the point (“many of the otaku characters created in recent years are connected to many characters across individual works” (p 49)) we are testing on the JVMG database; in part two we discussed the two datasets (The Visual Novel Database (VNDB) and Anime Characters Database (ACDB)) we are working with and the operationalization of our concepts on these datasets. Furthermore, we examined some key descriptive statistics , and based on what we saw, we reformulated our initial two hypotheses to be the following:
continue readingTiny Use Case 2: Can we test one of the points from Hiroki Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” with the JVMG database? Part 2: Descriptive statistics
In the first part of this series we introduced Hiroki Azuma’s seminal book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, and identified a point to try and test on the JVMG database, namely that “many of the otaku characters created in recent years are connected to many characters across individual works” (p 49). This led to the formulation of the following two hypotheses.
continue readingTiny Use Case 2: Can we test one of the points from Hiroki Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” with the JVMG database? Part 1: Formulating a hypothesis
Hiroki Azuma’s Dōbutsu ka suru posutomodan: otaku kara mita nihon shakai (Animalizing postmodern: Japanese society as seen from otaku), published by Kōdansha in 2001, has been one of the most influential treatises on not only Japanese otaku (the word roughly translates to avid fans of anime, manga, games, etc., similar in meaning to geek in the English language domain), but also on the production and consumption paradigm defining Japanese anime, manga, light novels and games in late modernity. The books impact on the discourse around otaku and the just enumerated domains is truly international thanks in part to the English translation, which was published in 2009 as Otaku: Japan’s database animals (introduction and translation by Jonathan E. Abel & Shion Kono, University Of Minnesota Press, all quotes in the following are from this English edition).
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