Category: General

– 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.

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The 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.

We are happy to report that members of the project will be presenting their research in connection with the JVMG at a number of different events in the upcoming weeks and months.

Saskia Dreßler will be presenting her research at FanLIS 2025: “5 Years of FanLIS” on May 22 with the title “How subversive is shipping really? An analysis of heteronormative elements in same-sex relationships focused on German-language anime and manga fan fiction“.

We will be doing a whole panel at Mechademia 2025 Kyoto, to be held 7-9. June, titled “Metadata Analytics for the Mechademia Field: Introducing Phase Two of the Japanese Visual Media Graph Project“. Saskia Dreßler and Christopher Zysik will also be presenting individual papers on their research on Japanese popular culture at the conference.

Christopher Zysik will then be presenting on his work at the Waseda International Workshop: Rethinking the Relationship Between Beauty and Gender on June 11.

Finally, August 20-22 we will be at the Goethe University Frankfurt presenting on our project work at the 19. Deutschsprachiger Japanologentag.

The WIJA (Women in Japanese Animation) project, which started in 2024, aims to create a database of notable female creators working in the Japanese animation industry, and to explore gender representations in Japanese anime through the lens of the position of female creators involved in the production process of the examined works. The WIJA project page is now live, and you can follow all upcoming updates about the project there: for example, their series of posts on female pioneers in Japanese animation, so far featuring Kazuko Nakamura and Reiko Okuyama.

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After visiting the DeDeCo convention in 2022, we were last year again asked by the organizers if we could present an update on the project. Given that our project relies on data from online enthusiast websites, we want to share our results with the larger Manga/Anime fan community and were happy to have such an opportunity again. Two members of the project team travelled to Dresden in February to attend DeDeCo 2025.

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We will be presenting in Dresden at DeDeCo 2025 on the weekend of February 21-23. We are very excited to be returning to the event after three years.

Then, on the 25th of March we will be presenting together with Mathieu Mallard on “The pleasures of Anime and Manga Fandom” as part of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen‘s Guilty Pleasures event series (thanks to the coordinating organizational work of Ádám Havas).

This will be followed by our presentation at the online leg of the Global Digital Humanities Symposium 2025 (April 2-4) organized by Michigan State University.

Finally, we will be presenting on the project at the Spring MondoCon 2025 (May 3-4) in Budapest.

We are very happy to report that our collaborators at the GOLEM project have been making huge strides towards their goal of creating a comprehensive knowledge graph to enable the large-scale quantitative exploration of stories, characters and events in fanfiction narratives.

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We will be reporting on our joint work with the GOLEM project at FanLIS 2024: Building Bridges II, organized by CityLIS, on the 23rd of May, online.

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In the second project phase Dr. Martin Hennig (PI) and Christopher Zysik from the University of Tübingen joined the project for the implementation and data-ethical reflection of genres and associated categories, that is to say, to be sensitive of the cultural origins of the categories and terms. The main goal is the integration of comprehensive genre categories, the development of appropriate theoretical models as well as corresponding research questions, that can be answered using the database.

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We are happy to report that the Archive Center for Anime Studies at the Asian Link Research Center, Niigata University has published a detailed website about their ongoing research in relation to the Watanabe Collection, one of their core collections. This comprehensive overview explores not only the story and contents of the collection itself, but also the development of handling intermediate production materials in the anime industry in general, and the various legal implications of these practices past and present especially regarding preservation and research work with such materials.

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