But then off again to Anime Expo!

Sorry for the aberrant hiatus, everyone. Been really busy in the past few weeks with:

- Open Video Conference, where I spoke about the anime fandom’s balancing act of video culture and copyright law
- Web Ecology Project: We released a white paper full of quantitative analysis about how ideas move in the discourse regarding the Iranian Election on Twitter
- Hanging out in NYC with the crew from my Kyoto study abroad group (KCJS)

I really want/need to write articles this week, so I’ll try to get a lot of content up soon. But I have a lot on my plate right now, specifically fandom research in California and drawing up grant proposals for fandom research in Boston and Tokyo.

Good news is that come Thursday I’ll be in Los Angeles, speaking at Anime Expo. I have four panels lined up, which are:

Anime and Manga in Academia
Saturday, July 04, 2009 6:00pm to 6:50pm – LP 2
Whether you have just begun studying anime and manga seriously or are already well into your studies, this panel will guide you on the path from fan to established Japanese popular culture scholar.

Introduction to Anime/Manga Studies
Friday, July 03, 2009 10:30am to 11:20am – LP 3
Ever wanted to write a school paper on religion in Naruto? Read a book on Neon Genesis Evangelion? Or even get a college degree in otaku studies? Come meet the members of the Anime/Manga Research Circle!

The Problem with Otaku
Sunday, July 05, 2009 12:00pm to 12:50pm LP 2
From 1980s science fiction geeks, the concept of otaku has wholly transformed in Japan and America. We’ll examine the history and controversies of the most crucial part of the anime fandom: the fans.

Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes
Friday, July 03, 2009 6:00pm to 6:50pm LP 3
When we watch anime, we tend to ignore what begins and ends series. But these small clips matter too! We’ll discuss history and music, and show some of the most influential OPs & EDs out there.

The rest of my potential schedule looks like this:

Thursday
- Digital Manga Publishing Industry Panel & eManga Demonstration (will miss due to plane arrival)
- Kouga Guest Panel (may miss due to plane arrival)
- Morikawa Guest Panel (may miss due to plane arrival)
- Morning Musume Guest Panel
- Imaishi & Nishigori Guest Panel
- Right Stuf & Nozomi Entertainment Industry Panel
- eigoMANGA Industry Panel
- Japan’s Hottest Doujin Videogames
- Gainax Focus Panel
- The Making of Gurren Lagann Documentary

Friday
- Introduction to Anime/Manga Studies
- Mizushima & Kuroda Guest Panel
- Gundam: The 30 Year Anniversary
- Manga as High Art
- VIZ Media Anime & Manga Panel
- Evangelion 1.0.1 Panel (won’t have time to see the movie due to…)
- Without Watching the Anime: OPs & EDs

Saturday
- The Indecent Otaku Comedy Hour
- Nightow & Nishimura Guest Panel
- Digital Distribution of Anime & Manga
- FUNimation Industry Panel
- Anime & Manga in Academia

Sunday
- Directors Panel [or] Breaking Into Anime Journalism [or] Convention Feedback Session
- Crunchyroll Panel [or] SPJA Board of Directors Panel
- The Problem with Otaku
- Production I.G.
- Closing Ceremonies

Also, I’m still scheduled to speak on a number of panels at Otakon, so if you’re not available to fly out to California this week, I’ll see you in Baltimore!

Been pretty busy this week (as evidenced by the lack of updates). Right now, I’m done in New York, prepping for the Open Video Conference, being held at NYU Law.

I’ll be presenting a talk on Saturday at 5:00 pm called “Online Video Culture: The Case of Fansubs, Anime Music Videos, and Copyright.” What I’m “supposed” to talk about:

The first fansubs (episodes of Japanese animation subtitled by fans, for fans) and AMVs (anime music videos, in which Japanese animation is timed to music) were produced in the United States in the 1980s in fans’ homes on VCR players. Twenty years later, these pieces of videography have proliferated across the Internet, creating an online video culture that has clashed with commercial forces as new issues of distribution and copyright have arisen. Alex Leavitt, a researcher of anime & manga studies and an analyst on the YouTomb project, will discuss the involvement of these fan groups with “illegal” production and file sharing; the videos’ ramifications on copyright law and discussions of free use; and the cultural flow of these fan-produced videos in contention with the new commercial and legal models of streaming sites (Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu) and sharing hubs (YouTube & Nico Nico Douga).

If you’re interested in awesome talks and interesting people, check out the Open Video Conference website starting on Friday at 10:00 am, because all of the talks will be streaming online for your viewing pleasure. Also, if you can’t take the time out this weekend, all of the talks will be recorded and made available to the world. Check out all the details here.

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.

The important issue to take away from TED’s audacious project is something that Ethan Zuckerman summed up quite nicely on Twitter: “TED’s approach to translating video is a first step towards translating the web.” He links to an article of his own that gives a brief background to TED’s translation project. Of course, my stance on the issue of social translation is that fansubs in the anime community have been doing it for years, so it’s not necessarily something “new.” At the same time, however, the social element has never really been an active component of fansubbing. But there was an attempt, one that might have had huge repercussions for the anime industry.

When I attended Otakon in the summer of 2008, I decided off the cuff to drop in on Crunchyroll‘s industry panel, held on Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm in Workshop 1. There’s a lot of information that was passed around at Otakon 2008 in regards to fansubbing and translation — the Fansubs and Industry panel probably the most discussed (note: you can watch the panel via that link to Anime News Network) — but Vu Nguyen announced that Crunchyroll had plans to release tools for the creation of community-driven subtitles.

Keep in mind, the announcement took place before Crunchyroll went “legal.” At the time, the website still hosted anime and Asian dramas that may or may not have been licensed. Putting that aside, though, Crunchyroll provided fans a platform on which to watch subtitled anime and a community through which dialogue could take place about that anime.

However, those subtitles were usually in English. In fact, most subtitles of anime roaming the Net are translated in English, though a good number have been written in other languages, such as French and Spanish (I’m not quite sure the balance of statistics between languages or how many languages are frequently used as goals for translation). Clearly language is a barrier to the wide dissemination of anime to potential fans around the world. Another limitation to translation is the structure of the fansub community. Basically, it takes the form of a team of translators and producers, working together toward a final result, coordinated by a central figurehead.

Social translation solves these two impediments on some level. First, there’s a better chance that more languages will be translated. A problem, of course, is that the translator needs to be bilingual (Japanese and X for anime, or English and Y for the TED talks). Second, tools are provided to take down the infrastructure of translation teams, instead putting the power into the hands of an individual.

I spoke with Vu after the Crunchyroll panel to go over a few details of the project. He first explained that the tools were easy to use. A user relied on the time codes of the English fansub to translate from Japanese to his (probably native) language. One issue that arises here is that the translator could be using the English fansubs to translate, instead of the original Japanese voice overs, but ultimately this is probably unavoidable. Still, it provides a somewhat accurate translation in a language that would otherwise probably not ever be translated. Vu also noted that the translations would be checked by some staff (he didn’t have many details, as the project was still in development) to ensure a certain level of accuracy (mainly to avoid the Nico Nico Douga effect of random text in place of actual subtitles).

I had meant to follow up with Vu in an interview for Youtomb, but then I shipped off to Japan last fall. I sent him an email to inquire further about the project, about which I could find no information this spring. He replied back in April:

As for the community subtitling project, we did launch it at some point for user uploaded content. I agree that it is one of the more ambitious projects. But Crunchyroll made a transition to fully licensed, so all of the content online has a licensing agreement in place and our challenge has been in getting the content holders to agree to allow fans to contribute subtitles. There’s IP issues (to which I think we have a good solution), quality issues (which I think content holders need to overcome), and security concerns (for new, yet to be aired content, there’s almost no way we can provide fans any work to translate prior to the air date, so we can’t use fans for simulcasts). We’re still chipping away at this, but I’m not sure how close we are to accomplishing it, and I’m hesitant to discuss too many details… until we make more progression on our side.

So, it seems that Crunchyroll is still in the process of creating some sort of social translation community around their already thriving membership. I wonder if TED’s project will further propel the CR ambitions further.

And I really hope it develops into something similar. If you didn’t read through the TED blog’s announcement, it details that each video translation will have an accompanying text transcript, in which a viewer can click on a sentence and immediately be brought to that spot in the video. If the fansub community or a CR social translation project were to pursue a similar initiative, this would have epic benefits for the anime research community. The availability of transcripts would be akin to throwing it back old school to the early days of American anime clubs, where a member would stand up at the front of the room and read a translation of the script as the Japanese-language animation played in the background. However, such a project takes that extinct practice and revamps it, providing researchers not only with a transcript but also the accompanying video, with which they can easily do a text search on the page and be transported to X point in the video clip, to examine the art relative to the speech. Of course, such a project begs all sorts of questions, particularly video hosting: is it possible to keep a database of videos that could be accessed while bypassing numerous legal and financial barriers?

The question, though, is certainly not one of fansubbing as a practice. At the recent Media in Transition conference at MIT, a Thursday night panel was hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program’s colloquium series called Global Media (the podcast can be listened to here). Most of the panelists agreed that, all over the world, fansubbing is thriving in genres from Bollywood to American bootlegs to tella novellas (to such an extent that it probably can’t be stopped). It seemed that the panelists were more concerned protecting local works and saw more benefits in the circulation of their works than in the loss of monetary content. For Japanese animation, this might mean that Japan should be focusing on their home turf. But we can’t ignore that companies in the US have been set up to distribute anime, which is the main factor that complicates the Japanese market and its profits.

Ultimately, there are only benefits for TED, who own their own videos because it is their personal content. They do not have to deal with complications with copyright or monetization. As far as the anime industry, it’s a completely different set of matters. As Vu stated, simulcasts are out of the question for fan-curated translations, and getting around questions of intellectual property is going to require some deep thought.

We’ll have to wait and see where this ends up. But if you’re interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be at the Open Video Conference in New York on June 19 and 20 to give a talk about the the history and culture of Japanese animation in the US and its past/future implications. Come check it out, especially for the other talks (which are obviously going to be way more interesting than mine).