Fanfic Forensics

I'm no longer updating this site because my center of operations has moved to my Dreamwidth journal. All research data are there, and the project remains exactly the same.

At first I thought to make only a temporary move to Dreamwidth, but I'm very impressed with the possibilities, ease of use, and general openness of the service. While a dedicated personal site has many obvious advantages, the upkeep is more of a bother than a joy a lot of the time. And trying to centralize everything in one place has lost its charm a bit: I work much more spontaneously when all I have is a journaling account (which feels much less formal than a blog) with links to the other web services I use. Also, it's much easier to communicate with others if I do my work right where all the interesting people are instead of asking them to come over and visit my website.

So, while I'm not nixing this site entirely because I have some super-secret uses for it yet, please update all bookmarks and rss feeds. Thank you!

For those of us who read Dutch, a new report on the state of the comics industry in Belgium includes an article by Haruyuki Nakano (author of Manga Sangyoron) on the spectacular rise and quite exciting possibilities of manga on cellphones in Japan and Asia. The article starts from page 49 o this rather large pdf version of the report. Published by SMartBe, translated from the Japanese by me.

It's a fascinating read, especially because we're always being inundated by doomtastic reports about the declining sales of paper manga and magazines that fail to point out how well the digital part of the manga market is actually doing. Nakano says that the market for digital literature in Japan is currently worth a good 500 million euros, and over four fifths of that is generated by digital manga. That's sixteen (16) times the size of that same digital market was in 2005.

If you can get past the smaller screen, distributing digital manga and comics via cellphones makes a lot of sense. You probably have the platform already in your pocket right at this moment: everyone and their dog owns a cellphone, while the iPad and similar tablets are owned by a very small percentage of the world population, and are still expensive and cumbersome in comparison. Cellphones are a much more widespread and much more democratic medium than dedicated readers or tablets. Going through cumbersome signups or transmitting credit card details is also not necessary when buying manga over a cellphone, because the price of any manga you purchase is just added to the monthly phone bill. All in all, a very user-friendly model, if you overlook the fact that manga bought via a cellphone probably can't be read on any other devices (should look into that).

For the curious among us, there's some more resources on cellphone manga in our manga research knowledge base.

Important notice! The main online home of my PhD research, this drupal site, is such fun to tinker with that it's become a a tremendously powerful procrastination-enabling device. I constantly find myself focusing more on the site itself than on creating actual content for it. So, I'm at least temporarily moving my center of operations to my Dreamwidth journal. The project itself is still exactly the same, and my commitment to open notebook research remains. In fact, it will be easier to follow because I'll be linking from Dreamwidth to research data stored on other shiny software services, instead of trying to recreate the functionality of these services on a personal website. All research data are linked to from the sidebar of the journal. I probably won't crosspost everything to the drupal site, so you may want to update any RSS subscriptions to the Dreamwidth feed. The drupal site isn't closing: I want to get back to it later, and there's a lot of links going there. I'm just putting it in cryofreeze temporarily because it's become a time sinkhole. Time to focus on creating content instead of playing with software all day long.

And on that note, I have a paper to finish, so I'll wax poetic about my favourite software services some other time. For those of you who aren't familiar with Dreamwidth, I very much hope you'll enjoy it -it's a rather wonderful open project.

Just got back from the conference Intercultural Crossovers, Transcultural Flows: Manga/Comics (pdf) in Cologne. Apologies for the late update -hotel wifi was crummy and expensive, and wifi inside the conference hall was mostly nonexistent, so I couldn't post or tweet during the conference. At least half of the attendants I chatted with turned out to be on Twitter, and not being able to have online discussion during the presentations seemed like a missed opportunity. There's talk of a follow-up conference already. Can we have wifi next time? :)

Overall, I had a great time, mostly because I got to meet a ton of interesting new people and reconnect with those I'd already met at that other conference in Kyoto last December. My attention during the conference was mostly on the fan studies-related presentations, and they were a bit limited for the most part. There was a lot of ethnography, which made for some interesting data but mostly resulted in fairly superficial overviews of manga fandom in various countries. (And one description of a large-scale survey research across several European countries that made me want to tear my hair out because of its outdated methodology and monkeys-in-the-zoo approach to manga fans. The least said about that one, the better.) Talks during the breaks and dinners were a lot more interesting and insightful, as per usual. A special thank you to Thomas Becker, Pascal Lefèvre, Verena Maser, Zoltan Kacsuk, Jaqueline Berndt, Martin Roth, Elisabeth Klar, Kenji-Thomas Nishino and Fujimoto Yukari for the interesting discussions.

The workshop on Naruto on the third day ended up being my favourite part of the conference. Having one common theme tying the presentations together made every new talk feel at least somewhat familiar and much more interesting to listen to. It was fascinating to see so many divergent viewpoints on one and the same series; for instance, Fujimoto Yukari heavily critiqued Naruto's female characters while Fusami Ogi instead called them 'strong' in her own presentation immediately afterwards. I wish I could have squeezed in a question about that, but alas, discussion time at the end of the presentations almost always ended up too short. Omote Tomoyuki and Ito Go did two of the few presentations that had me paying attention from the first to the last word, and I'm going to try and find out if their material is online anywhere so I can link. Martin Roth's argument was hard to follow because I lack basic knowledge about video game theory, but provoked some great discussion, for instance on the added value for hardcore fans of games that add little to the story of whatever manga/anime they're based on. I must confess to having read only one volume of Naruto ever, but the workshop made me want to tear through the whole series right away. Will get right to that as soon as the work situation calms down.

I did a presentation on methodological issues that crop up in attempts to do comparative research on Japanese-language and English-language fan comics. Unexpected business during the week leading up to the conference drastically reduced my preparation time, and the presentation ended up a a lot more jumbled than I'd hoped. I wish I'd had more time to polish the structure. Fortunately, the audience was very forgiving and took me seriously anyway. I'm polishing up the presentation and a brief summary with tons of links. Post to follow next week.

Hello, I'm still alive. Expect a flurry of posts this week -there's a lot to talk about, from this conference in Cologne to research and travel plans to website-related grumblings.

First, a tidbit of news that still has me cartwheeling around the room a week after the fact: I just signed a contract for a four-year research position that will allow me to study dojinshi and English-language fanwork full time, starting this week. There's a working budget and everything. I'm staying at my current university, but will probably head to Japan for several years in the very near future. More on that when things are definite. The last half year has been a bit of a muddle, with lots of stress about non-research work and very little research actually taking place. That's obviously set to change now that I'm getting paid to work on this project and only this project.

Many, many thanks to my advisor professor Willy Vande Walle and all the other people who helped me apply for this position, and who tirelessly badgered officials until they caved in and decided it would be a good idea to finally give funding to fanwork research in Belgium. I will use my new powers for good!