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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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Tiny Use Case – Kaiju Genre Part I

To tackle the problem of genre consolidation and the potential role of media tropes for merging several, varying databases about Japanese visual media, the following Tiny Use Case is narrowed down to the Kaiju genre. Due to its diverse nature, the Kaiju genre provides a special challenge to evaluate its genre-defining core tropes from a data-analytical perspective. Thus, gained insights can provide a solid base for further studies on other genres. Additionally, because contemporary genre research focuses on tropes as a transmedia concept to understand the notion “genre”, the question whether this method is still viable in times of digital databases has to be raised.

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Exploring and integrating genres in the second phase of the JVMG project

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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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.

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New online materials on the Watanabe Collection at the Archive Center for Anime Studies, Niigata University

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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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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