We had the great pleasure of presenting our research and the JVMG project at the 19. Deutschsprachigen Japanologentag at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main two weeks ago. The conference, held every three years, is a gathering place for researchers working on topics related to Japan and the Japanese language from a multitude of disciplines. We contributed to one of the joint panels of the information and resource science section, organized by Nobutake Kamiya and Cosima Wagner, and the media studies section, organized by Björn-Ole Kamm.
Continue readingPresence at upcoming events, August-September 2025
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.
Presenting at Mechademia 2025
Last weekend and Monday (June 7-9) saw the JVMG team represent the project at one of the most highly anticipated events for us, the Mechademia 2025 conference in Kyoto with a whole panel on some of the new results of the second phase. Taking place once again at Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum the conference was even bigger than two years ago, with multiple parallel panels running throughout the three days and more than a hundred and fifty presenters from all over the world. Furthermore, for the first time the conference featured both English and Japanese as official languages of the event, allowing for an even more inclusive exchange of ideas around researching anime, manga, video games and related fields of Japanese popular culture.
Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part III – Transmediality and Trope Cluster Analysis
In our previous blog post, we concluded that the TV Tropes data about live-action films alone is not sufficient to understand what constitutes the kaiju genre, a tokusatsu (jap. 特撮, “special effects”) subgenre in Japan, on this fan-curated database. This observation is based on the list of supposedly genre-defining tropes of kaiju works on TV Tropes. In comparison to the list of core tropes extracted from the dataset of live-action kaiju films, we observed significant differences with the list of tropes provided by TV Tropes. Additionally, we concluded that individual tropes provided in the dataset are not sufficient to develop a core understanding of the kaiju genre in the fan community. Thus, we will first examine the transmediality of the kaiju genre on TV Tropes by examining tropes attributed to other media works, such as TV series, games, anime, and manga. In the next step, we will explore and compare potential clusters of kaiju tropes between different media to examine similarities and differences between them.
Continue reading “Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part III – Transmediality and Trope Cluster Analysis”Mechademia issue “Methodologies” now available open access online
We are very happy to report that the latest issue of Mechademia (Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2025) – the premier English language journal on anime and manga studies and related fields – titled Methodologies and edited by Jaqueline Berndt is now available open access online. The issue contains an article by Martin Roth and Zoltan Kacsuk, Introducing Metadata Analytics: Harnessing the Power of Data from Online Fan Communities for Research on Japanese Popular Visual Media, which explains in detail the methodological underpinnings of the type of research the JVMG project aims to further.
FanLIS 2025: Celebrating Five Years of Fandom and Library Science Dialogue
– 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.
Continue readingThe book “Unboxing Japanese Videogames” is now available
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.
Presence at upcoming events, May-August 2025
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 Japanese Visual Media Graph project at MondoCon Spring 2025 in Budapest
– A short report by Saskia Dreßler –
On May 3, 2025, the Japanese Visual Media Graph project was invited to give a presentation at MondoCon in Budapest. There the JVMG project members had the opportunity to present their research and work related to Japanese popular media. MondoCon is the largest anime and manga convention in Hungary and one of the most prominent events of its kind in Eastern Europe. The convention has been running since 2009 with multiple events each year.
Continue readingThe WIJA (Women in Japanese Animation) project page is now live
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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