Alisa Freedman (alisaf@uoregon.edu)

Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film

Using a comparative approach that focuses on Japan and the United States, one strand of my research and teaching explores how digital media is shaping publishing trends, engendering languages, forming communities of readers, and changing notions of literature. Perhaps more than in any other nation, access to the Internet and developments in computer and mobile technologies have influenced cultural production in Japan and have given rise to a new form of superpower based on the spread of popular trends.

New technologies have both blurred and cemented the boundaries between artistic genres and between readers and authors, raising questions about marketing, ownership, and copyrights. Japanese stories made possible by digital culture are inspiring younger generations’ world views and impacting upon international relations. Below I will discuss some online resources we use in my courses to explore how Internet and mobile technologies affect the creation, consumption, and circulation of stories. As texts change in the digital age, so do the ways that we study and teach them.

For example, we analyze how Japanese cellphones have changed the ways that people communicate, giving rise to new digital languages and literatures. Japanese cellphones have been on the vanguard of global trends, such as text messaging (Short Message Service, SMS) and emoticons. Japanese cellphones have had more uses than those in other countries, due to the provider system and technological developments, as well as the fact that installing landlines has been extremely expensive. In class, we analyzes how SMS altered customs of formal written communication, which has historically relied on set seasonal greetings and “mahō no kotoba,” magically polite words, to soothe social relationships. Abbreviations and visual languages have developed to save space and convey feelings but have demanded communal knowledge to be understood. For example, SKY, for Supā Kūki Yomanai, meaning “super clueless,” was popular SMS slang in 2007. Japanese kaomoji, or “face characters” are horizontal while American “smileys” are vertical, in part because Japanese writing has historically been written from left to right, up to down. Digital culture has promoted horizontal writing in Japan.

The first emoji (literally, picture characters) was a heart mark on the “Pocket Bell” pager in 1995. Colorful, sometimes animated, emoji were created around 1999 by NTT designer Kurita Shigetaka and have been preprogrammed into cellphones, differing slightly according to provider. The yellow faces, holiday symbols, and other now iconic emoji, are part of Japanese “kawaii” (cute premised on seeming vulnerable) aesthetics, characterized by big heads, missing noses or mouths, and large eyes to show emotion. A standard set of emoji has globalized on iPhones, Windows phones, Skype, Facebook and other platforms, while including images like the bowing man and masked sick face that require knowledge of Japanese society to be understood.

A fun website on cultural misunderstandings of Japanese emoji: http://www.buzzfeed.com/hillarylevine/emoji-explained-by-clueless-adults#.whOXjMNn8

For recent developments in global use of emoji:
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/best-of-2014-the-year-in-emojis

The Line mobile application (started by a Japanese company based in Korea in 2011 and Japan’s largest social network in 2013) has promoted the use of “stickers,” large-size emoji depicting original and famous characters.
My classes analyze how emoji and kaomoji have changed interpersonal communication and social relationships. We speculate on their use in literature. For example, we analyzed the literary qualities gained and lost by rendering novels in emoji, as evidenced in the crowd-sourced Emoji Dick (based on Melville’s Moby-Dick). To better understand the challenges, we wrote and translated stories. Pictured below is UO student Kathryn Lovett’s translation of the first line of a famous nineteenth-century novel. Can you guess which one?

New book forms made possible by digital media include novels written to be read on cellphones (keitai shōsetsu) and novels collectively written on large Internet forums. In both cases, although the stories were available for free online, the officially published book versions sold millions of copies, showing the continued endurance of print media. Both forms were especially popular in Japan between 2005 and 2007, pivotal years in the spread of the Internet (i.e. Facebook and Youtube went public around 2005) and the globalization of Japanese popular culture. Both forms grabbed the attention of the international press and were adapted into television dramas and feature films, among other media, and inspired sequels and spin-offs. (Cross-media promotion has long been a dominant marketing trend in Japan.)

The trend for new novels available for cellphone serialization began in 2000 with Deep Love: Ayu’s Story (Deep Love – Ayu no monogatari) written by a 30-something man under the penname Yoshi, who opened Zavn.net, a website for cellphone access, to publicize his original works. Deep Love, the story of the decline of Ayu, a 17-year-old who engages in enjo kōsai compensating dating, an issue widely discussed in the mass media at the time, was first available only to Zavn.net subscribers but was later picked up by a major publishing company. The novel became a bestseller, spawning sequels, manga series, television dramas, and live action films.

The best-known website for circulating cellphone novels has been Magic Island (Mahō no i-rando, “i” in “island” a pun for i-Mode digital services), opened as a homepage provider in 1999, preceding the launch of Japan’s local Amazon bookseller (Amazon.co.jp) by one year. Starting in 2000, Magic Island included a “book function” (BOOK kinō) enabling users to write stories in 1,000-character chapters, up to 500 pages, for free. The first Magic Island novel published as a print book was What the Angels Gave Me (Tenshi ga kureta mono, Starts Publishing, 2005) by Chaco, who became one of the most prolific cellphone novelists. In 2004, the Japanese provider DoCoMo began offering unlimited domestic text messaging in their monthly packet plans, a change that made the writing of novels on cellphones more economically feasible.

-Keitai shōsetsu are nicely explained on the English cellphone novel site Textnovel http://www.textnovel.com/keitai

-A fan-translated excerpt of the bestselling 2007 keitai shōsetsu Love Sky (Koizora) can be found at http://www.themillionsblog.com/2008/01/big-in-japan-cellphone-novel-for-you.html

The most popular Internet novel has been Train Man (Densha otoko), which, in 2005, became bestselling book written in the format of website posts in 2005, a film, television series, stage play, four manga, and even an adult video. An inspiring love story of an awkward nerd (otaku) and a fashionable workingwoman based on a supposedly real event, Train Man was created through anonymous posts on the expansive 2channel from March to May 2004 and reads like a dating guide to Tokyo. (Founded in 1999 by Nishimura Hiroyuki, 2channel is Japan’s most influential textboard and is comprised of more than 600 forums a wide range of topics.) The story centers on the couple and the online community who encouraged them.

Along with text messages written in slang created on 2-channel, subscribers posted ASCII artwork, both “kaomoji” and elaborate pictures comprised of letters, punctuation marks, and other printable characters. For the print book, the collective author was given the name Nakano Hitori, a pun for “one among us.” The real identity of Train Man remains unknown. In addition to changing notions of books and furthering the marketing trend of cross-media promotion, Train Man encouraged debates in the mass media about Japanese men and marriage during a time of national concern over falling birthrates.

Although the trend has died out, cellphone novels and Internet novels provided models for later commercialization of fan-produced culture. They exemplified what were becoming conventions of Japanese Internet use, including access patterns, visual languages, user identifications, and corporate tie-ins. At the same time, they encouraged public discussions about groups on the fringes of Japanese society, particularly delinquent girls and male otaku.

(Interested in learning some Japanese Internet Slang? Check out 2-Channel English Portal  http://4-ch.net/2chportal/)

Other digital stories we study include both legal and unlicensed fan creations, from fanfiction and AMV (animated music videos) to manga scanlations (amateur scanning of manga pages and translation of speech bubbles) and anime fansubs.

(Winning AMV from the Nan Desu Kan anime convention can be accessed at http://ndkdenver.org/forum/index.php/topic,8666.0.html)

I argue that is important for teachers to make students aware of how they appropriate Japanese trends and resist copyrights to fully understand the role of the Internet in the globalization of culture. We also explore how digital media has changed the ways books are marketed. Favorite class activities include evaluating book trailers and designing book covers. These forms provide further insight into how digital media has shaped the creation, circulation, and consumption of stories.

______________________________________________________________

Are you a UO faculty member interested in getting involved with NMCC and/or being our next Prof Picks feature? Please contact us.

Jacob Levernier:
PhD student, Department of Psychology

I am a fourth-year doctoral student in Psychology. My research is on understanding the moral sensibilities of different types of people and their communities, and my work often sits at the intersection of Psychology, applied Statistics, moral Philosophy, and Computer Science. I do a lot of web scraping and other types of data processing to turn pieces of public records (e.g., obituaries) into usable data for research, and am interested in the extent to which how people actually think about morality and privacy (especially in relation to data that they generate) can inform discourse on policy-making.

I’m especially interested in data ethics and data management-how people think about data privacy and surveillance, what policies are ethical to apply when dealing with data (from survey answers to email logs to social media archives), and how best to store data to encourage future ethical use.

Recent Research:

In collaboration with Mark Alfano and Andrew Higgins, some of the work in which I’m currently involved extracts communities’ values out of the obituaries that they publish. It’s interesting to note, for example, that in the 170 obituaries published in The Eugene Register-Guard in November/December 2013, almost one in 10 noted that the deceased was a Ducks fan. Given that most obituaries are brief (and may have word limits), this suggests to me that being a sports fan in Eugene has something to do with signaling membership in a larger group ΓÇö for example, that the deceased was invested in the well-being or cohesion of the Eugene community.

Zagzebski (1996), a philosopher specializing in virtue theory, proposed that “one way to express the depth required for a trait to be a virtue or a vice is to think of it as a quality we would ascribe to a person if asked to describe her after her death.” We’re exploring that idea in this research. The project sits at the intersection of Psychology and Philsophy, and is enabled on a large scale (our current dataset is over 13,000 obituaries) by new media.

Regarding the importance of new media studies:
O’Neil and Schutt (2013) popularized the term “datafication” to capture the trend of seeing and gathering data where before it would have been infeasible or uninteresting. Fitbits, for example, “datafy” individuals’ health decisions, from activity levels to food intake.

In 2014, Facebook introduced a feature in their mobile app that would remotely activate users’ microphones at various times to “identify TV and music” that the user might be enjoying. Where before there would have been no or only very limited data on these topics (before, one might record one’s food choices in a daily journal, or perhaps pay an assistant to watch one throughout the day and make records), there is now persistent data, which often enable incidental usage (although Facebook stated that it “can’t identify background noise or conversation,” it would not be unreasonable to expect that conversations could be recorded and stored with such an app feature).

This is the context in which I see the study of new media, and where I see their relation to culture: from a research perspective, new media enable new types of inquiry on large scales, both of data quantity and of time; however, they also bring new ethical issues, with which legislation has not yet been able to begin to catch up. In my mind, researchers, as the curators and stewards of these data, carry a moral responsibility to understand these issues and act with them in mind. Understanding and maintaining literacy in the advantages and disadvantages of data storage and usage decisions is complex and requires a creativity that likely is best engendered by cross-disciplinary study, in which historical and philosophical perspectives meet technical ones.

The New Media and Culture Certificate is valuable, in my mind, because it is an interdisciplinary program that focuses both on technical skill and critical commentary. As a student of Psychology, I feel that my research especially, and my consuming habits as a user incidentally, have benefitted from the insight of disciplines such as Journalism and the Digital Humanities. Working in the NMCC-affiliated Digital Scholarship Center with graduate students from these and related disciplines has allowed me to more critically interrogate my own methods from a broader perspective.

Given how linked they are to both high-technology and Digital Humanities, new media are also explicitly the meeting-ground of scholarship of the past and technology of the present and future. Before I learned that databases are a field of study, I developed a fascination with medieval mnemonic devices. Until the Protestant Reformation, students of means were routinely taught, for example, to construct mental houses through which they could walk, placing imagined objects that would symbolize things to remember.

In this approach, recalling the summaries of Bible chapters (many students at the time were monastics), lessons from the Trivium or Quadrivium, or whatever else, involved taking a mental walk back through the relevant part of one’s memory palace. This woodcut (fig.1) from the sixteenth century includes mental cues for the summaries of chapters seven through 12 in the Bible’s Gospel of Luke (who is traditionally symbolized by an Ox).

Current Reading/Resource Recommendations:

There’s a growing movement in the sciences and Digital Humanities to improve code literacy among both researchers and consumers. The Mozilla Foundation’s Software Carpentry, for which I’m a volunteer instructor, offers software and data “bootcamps” for providing researchers with crash-courses in scientific programming and data management; all of the lesson materials are posted freely online, and are a useful resource.

 Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind: Part III: Memory is the single best introduction to image-based mnemonics (memory devices) that I’ve found. Brown’s explanations are approachable and entertaining, as well as based in practice: Brown is a psychological illusionist in the UK, and applies these techniques regularly.

Ethan McCallum’s (2012) Bad Data Handbook and Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neil’s Doing Data Science (2013) are both very approachable collections of real-world examples in which the use of digital data has met with logistical or ethical issues; Schutt and O’Neil’s book was written after the authors taught a course on the topic, and reflects methodological and theoretical questions that students new to the topic raised.

I’m also a fan of the once-weekly podcast TechSNAP (“Systems, Network, and Administration Podcast”), available for free online. Although the podcast’s intended audience is Systems Administrators (i.e., IT professionals who manage servers), much of the content comprises explaining data breaches in the news and exploring how they might have been avoided. Listening to shows like TechSNAP is a simple way to stay up-to-date on new developments in fields that are directly relevant to Digital Humanities, “data science,” and reproducible research.