Category: General

We are delighted to announce that following our recent visit at the Game Preservation Society‘s (GPS) head office, we have now added their data to the JVMG knowledge graph. This collaboration was made easy thanks to the GPS already offering an RDF version of the metadata from their online catalog under the very permissive and open CC0 license. A big thank you to Joseph Redon for making some adjustments to their RDF data as well as preparing the GPS ontology file to enable an almost seamless integration of their data. You can now see the entities and their numbers for their subgraph on our overview page, search and browse their data on our frontend, and also find the GPS listed among our data sources. We are excited to see what researchers working on old Japanese computer games will explore with the help of this new dataset in the JVMG knowledge graph.

Thanks to the kind invitation of Shigeo Sugimoto we had the pleasure of participating in the Second Kyoto Informal Gathering on Researching the Archiving of Media Art (hosted this time by the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University). This is where we had the wonderful opportunity to talk to Koichi Hosoi, the director of the History of Content Industry Archives Research Center (HARC) at ZEN University and learn about their on-going projects. One of these projects at HARC is their Oral History Collection focusing on key figures from various business, development and creator roles in the Japanese content industries (ranging from anime and manga to IT development and internet culture). With new videos constantly being added to the collection this is an amazing resource even for researchers outside of Japan as all the interviews have publicly available versions online. Furthermore, all interviews come with added Japanese transcripts (in text form separate from the videos) making working with the materials even more researcher friendly.

Thanks to Andrea Mariucci we had an opportunity to visit the central office and main archive of the Game Preservation Society (GPS), where we were introduced to the society’s work by its founder and president, Joseph Redon. The GPS is a nonprofit organization that aims to archive, digitize and catalog the rich history of games created in Japan, prioritizing the preservation of the currently rapidly disappearing slice of this story from the eighties. Their expertise in hardware restoration and emulation along with their capabilities of near-forensic recovery of data from even mold-damaged old floppy discs and other media coupled with their commitment to exhaustively detailed cataloging and careful archiving practices position them as a premier source of ground truth for anyone conducting research on video games produced in Japan from this era. The GPS Game Catalog is available to browse online with their individual entries linked to MADB and also available in RDF format.

It fills us with great sadness to have to write that a key community collaborator on our project, Yoran Heling, or Yorhel as he was known in the VNDB community, has left us with tragic suddenness. Yoran and the enthusiast community he formed with his website vndb.org have been an important and valued contributor to the JVMG project. We met him for the first time seven years ago at our inaugural project workshop in Leipzig, and we have been in contact with him since. We were so happy that Yoran was able to join us in Kyoto for our JVMG Lab and Symposium there this February. The picture below is from his presentation at the symposium event. The memory is still fresh and we find it difficult to think of him as someone who is no longer among us. Our sincere condolences go out to his family, friends and community on behalf of the JVMG project and all our project members past and present. Yoran was one of the few people who read this blog regularly, so in closing we would like to offer two older blogposts that feature him, one about the inaugural Leipzig 2019 event and one about the Stuttgart 2023 event where we also had the pleasure of having him join us.

In our previous tiny use cases, we examined the occurrence and co-occurrence of tropes in kaiju works within the TV Tropes community. The aim of these previous use cases was to examine the relationship of tropes to genre to find out how the kaiju genre is defined within fan communities and whether tropes are a reliable approach to define/understand a specific genre. In this tiny use case, we examine the potential of fan-databases, in this case TV Tropes, for transcultural and historical data analyses. Besides exploring the data provided, we also investigate how historical data (here: release dates) and cultural data (here: country of origin) about kaiju works are handled on TV Tropes and how to deal with incomplete data. Additionally, we examine how fan-curated data can contribute to a data analysis of the transculturality and history of the kaiju genre.

Continue reading “Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part IV – Transcultural and Historical Data Analysis”

We 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.

The 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.

Returning 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.