Tag Archives: media in transition

Hatsune Miku Enters Academia

Reply
Posted on by

Last week on Friday, I was featured on In Media Res, an experimental academic publishing platform for short-form media-centric pieces from academics related to research questions and issues on which they’re currently working.

I’ve been doing some work on the Vocaloid franchise recently, and so I put up an article on Hatsune Miku and Japanese/global identity. You can check out the article here: The Global Cult(ure) of Hatsune Miku

This is the first bit of scholarship that I’ve written on the subject, with a bunch more opportunities coming in the next few months. I’ll be presenting a larger investigation of “open-source culture” and the Vocaloid franchise at Media in Transition 7 in a couple weeks as well as at a preconference for the International Communication Association conference later this month. Also, I’ll be presenting a similar paper at Anime Expo at the beginning of July: if you’re in LA, come by and say hello!

The Problems with The Problem of Online Manga

9
Posted on by

If you haven’t heard the news, a international coalition of 36 publishers and distributors are going to band together to take legal action against illegal manga distribution websites. You can read up on the story at Publishers Weekly. If you have no idea what a scanlation is, I highly suggest you visit http://insidescanlation.com for more information.

Online manga: where is it? Some would say it’s passed around via the Internet as scanlations. And that’s a problem.

That problem, though, is two-sided. The obvious first side is that scanlations are technically illegal. But the second — and more important — side is that legal alternatives to online manga distribution do not exist. Yes, you can say that there are experiments with online distribution (such as Viz’s online Signature Ikki magazine), but the fact remains that a universal and ubiquitous legal alternative for online distribution of every English-language manga published in the United States does not currently exist.

There are some subsequent problems as well, and I would like to take the opportunity of this post to go through them. I feel like these issues have not been addressed, particularly since no alternative to illegal distribution websites has been offered by the Coalition as of this writing.

Continue reading →

Fansubs: The New Wave

1
Posted on by


Scene from BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, episode 1

TED.com officially announced today a project that will crowdsource translations of every TED video in more than forty of the world’s most-vocalized languages. The splash page is viewable here.

The video above is a Japanese translation of Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of Photosynth, one of the more interesting yet much shorter videos available at the TED website. As you can see, the subtitles work pretty well and the timing is for the most part up to par. The only petulant remarks I can make about meticulous details would be: 1) there’s no furigana… but that only applies to Japanese anyway, and 2) the subtitles cover up the images when the projector is shown… but that’s unavoidable, and it’s not that important a matter.

Continue reading →