Presenting at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen

– A short report by Saskia Dreßler –

The JVMG project was invited to give three presentations at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut) in Essen on March 25. Our visit took place as part of the Institute’s event series Guilty Pleasures and was coordinated by Ádám Havas. Under the overarching theme The Pleasures of Anime and Manga Fandom, Zoltan Kacsuk, Mathieu Mallard, and Saskia Dreßler presented excerpts of their research as well as the JVMG project itself.

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Presenting at the Characters: Rights and Roles, International Workshop

June 25-26 saw the coming together of a host of researchers working on the cutting-edge of various aspects of characters for a super-intensive long-form workshop organized by Jaqueline Berndt at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University, the Characters: Rights and Roles, International Workshop. And we were fortunate enough to be there to witness the inspiring intensity of the talks and discussions, and to also contribute with our own experience from the JVMG project.

This event was one of those special occasions that are more like a true master-class on the state of the art of the topic woven together by all the participants through the constant discussions and cross-referencing of themes and questions, where the sum of the workshop became indeed more than just its individual parts, which in themselves were packed with so much detail – with an hour allotted for ample delivery and deliberation for each presenter – that this report can in no way do justice to them.

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Presenting at DH Benelux 2024

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.

Together with the GOLEM project members attending DH Benelux 2024.
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Presenting at FanLIS 2024: Fandom, AI the Immersive and building bridges between research areas

– 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.

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Public presentation on the JVMG project organized by PABKOM and KTKK

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.

Photo by PABKOM, used with permission.

Presenting at the Metadata Models for Digital Archiving of Intangible and Experiential Cultural Entities workshop at IFDIK 2023

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

Photo by the organizers, used with permission.
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Presenting at the “Doing things with anime materials: Approaching Japanese animation away from the screen” workshop

On the 21st of November we had the absolute pleasure of participating in the Doing things with anime materials: Approaching Japanese animation away from the screen workshop organized by Dario Lolli, hosted by the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture and sponsored by The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) and the DAIWA Anglo-Japanese Foundation. The workshop focused on anime intermediate production materials: their range, preservation, circulation, collection as well as their significance for research on anime. Durham University’s Oriental Museum served as both venue and focus for the workshop with its collection of both anime intermediate production materials as well as Japanese popular visual media.

Durham Castle photo by Carla Brain (source via Wikimedia Commons)
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Presenting at Estudios de Anime. Del objeto a las humanidades digitales.

Picture by Ana Soler Baena

On September 15th we took part in the mini-symposium Estudios de Anime. Del objeto a las humanidades digitales (Anime studies. From the object to the digital humanities.) organized by the research group dx5 digital_&_graphic_art_research at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidade de Vigo. This event was a wonderful opportunity to introduce the JVMG project in Spanish for the first time, as well as further develop our collaborations with our Spanish colleagues from both Pontevedra and Barcelona. There is even a detailed report on the mini-symposium in Galician.

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