Metadata for Visual Media Arts – Manga/Comics, Game, Animation

Transmedia storytelling utilizing multiple media channels to offer a unified entertainment experience is becoming more common in the context of popular culture. The complex fictional worlds involve interrelated characters, timelines, and related objects resulting in an array of different types of media objects that need to be organized and described to make them more accessible to end users. This raises questions about the current organizational systems on whether these relationships could be appropriately represented, as well as who needs to be involved in the organizational practices. This presentation focuses on a case study of a Korean music group BTS and how they use different media objects such as albums, music videos, webtoons, games, and printed materials to tell their narrative, and how fans take an active participatory role in interpreting them and creating related media content. This case study will illustrate how the role of the fans will become increasingly important in terms of describing, organizing, and preserving these transmedia objects.

The Media Arts Database is a national information service for collecting and searching metadata on manga, animation, video games, and media art produced in Japan. A unified data model has been defined on the back end of the database to provide standardized access to data from diverse sources. This presentation will introduce this data model and discuss the different concepts of works and collections in each medium and how we should solve this challenge. We will also discuss ideas for linking to external data sources, including Wikidata, and facilitating data use.

The Japanese Visual Media Graph Project combines information from multiple enthusiast websites into a knowledge graph targeted at researchers from Japanese and/or Media Studies. The presentation will discuss the domain models that are inherent in the data provided by the contributing communities and discuss similarities and differences. Of specific interest for the project is the handling of granularity of media works.

The intersection of comics and healthcare, or graphic medicine, includes comics and graphic novels that share personal stories of health, illness, and recovery, and are useful in educating patients as well as providing insight into the patent experience for caregivers and providers. This presentation outlines the methodology and results of a limited pilot study exploring the semantic enrichment of metadata for mental health comics by better connecting their content to healthcare-related Linked Open Data resources. This approach potentially enhances the discoverability of comics content for education and reuse, and is both multilingual and applicable to non-traditionally published works, including self-published and crowd-funded materials.