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.
In Memoriam Yoran Heling
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.
First JVMG Lab in Stuttgart
The very first JVMG Lab event was held at Stuttgart Media University on November 20-21. We had twelve brave and curious participants join us from all across Europe and beyond to explore how the JVMG knowledge graph could be utilized for their research questions and interests.
Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part IV – Transcultural and Historical Data Analysis
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”Presenting at the 4th EAJS Japan Conference
The 4th EAJS Japan Conference at Tohoku University gave us an opportunity to argue for understanding data collections as datascapes, meaning spaces that both describe domains (and as such, may shape their user’s perspective on a domain) and reflect the community that curates them (and as such, may speak to the relevances and practices in the community). We showcased this perspective by looking at the ACDB data collection, with particular interest in the ways in which it reflects the community’s interests, curatorial decisions, and the changes these undergo.
The presentation was well-received and followed by an intense discussion with researchers from diverse fields, which was exciting as it drew our attention to fantastic research initiatives in neighboring fields and institutions, such as the digital humanities initiative of the National Institute for the Humanities, represented by Tamako Kitaoka at the EAJS, and the metadata research Kathryn Ibata-Arens does on biomedical innovation. This helped support our hope that the concept of datascapes might be relevant beyond our immediate focus.
Overall, the conference was a great opportunity to hear about a wide range of research focusing on the Japan area and related questions, to catch up with colleagues from Europe, and to get to know Tohoku University.
Presentation of the Japanese Visual Media Graph Project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona
– 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 readingThe JVMG-Project at the Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Studies
We, Martin Hennig and Christopher Zysik, had the pleasure to present our research and the JVMG project at the Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft) at Paderborn University from September 16th to 19th. The Society for Media Studies brings together scholars from different disciplines involved with research around theories, practices, and structures of mass media and other forms of mediatization, such as communication, data, or transportation. This year, the hosts invited researchers to present and discuss the topic “Macht” (in engl.: “power”). We contributed with a presentation on “Macht in fankuratierten Datenbanken” (“Power in fan-curated databases”) and how the JVMG project enables a new perspective and method to approach this topic.
Continue reading “The JVMG-Project at the Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Studies”Upcoming event at Autonomous University of Barcelona and presence at DCMI2025
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.
Proceedings from the fifth FanLIS Symposium are now available open access online
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 readingShining a spotlight on the VinLOD Saga project
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.
