Cognitive Resonance

Moving blogs

2017-08-03T06:14:00Z

Somehow I neglected to mention that I have moved most of my blogging to my personal site. I don't anticipate many further entries on this one, though I intend to keep it up indefinitely. See you on WordPress!

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Belated post: Sirens Vidshow 2016

2017-08-02T06:05:12Z

Last fall I organized a vidshow at the Sirens Conference in Englewood, Colorado. I swore I'd post the playlist, and then I went to Belgium and Germany and when I came back reality blew up in our faces.

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Talk: The Origins of Japanese Comics, 1905-28

2016-05-06T06:42:43Z

Somewhat belatedly: I'm giving a talk on a portion of my dissertation tomorrow afternoon in Doe Library on the Berkeley campus. The abstract is below; I hope to see you there!

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Women Write About Comics, me included

2016-03-07T05:44:45Z

I'm very happy to say that I now have a gig as an occasional reviewer at Women Write About Comics! I'll be focusing on academic works related to comics, and my first review, of Katherine Roeder's Wide Awake in Slumberland, is now up at the site.

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Mechademia 10! Conference talks!

2016-02-06T04:19:49Z

It's been a whirlwind six weeks of moving continents and coasts, and I'm very behind on updates.

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OTW Board of Directors, again

2015-11-23T00:00:18Z

As has been announced elsewhere, I've decided to decline appointment to the OTW Board of Directors for the 2016 term and have tendered my resignation from the Board, effective 15 December 2015.

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OpenCon 2015

2015-11-14T14:54:42Z

I have the privilege to be one of the people attending OpenCon 2015 in person in Brussels this weekend. It's been a very thought-provoking gathering so far, and I'm excited to share back what I learn in my various projects.

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The World Without the OTW: Donate Now!

2015-10-09T17:02:03Z

It's the OTW's biannual membership drive again this week, and we're fundraising to continue to do our work in support of our mission and our projects!

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Quitting Wiscon

2015-10-06T17:22:07Z

I’m sorry to say that my co-chair s.e. smith and I have resigned as Wiscon 40 chairs and as members of the Wiscon concom, effective immediately. This is a really unfortunate decision to have had to make, and we very much regret placing the con in this position. That said, it seems clear that we are a poor culture fit for the concom, and we feel the need to prioritize self-care rather than further risk our own mental health and well-being. Another reason we are leaving now rather than later is that at this juncture there is still potentially time to find replacement chairs to bring Wiscon 40 to fruition.

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PCA/ACA 2016

2015-09-30T02:47:58Z

I'm very happy to say that I'll be presenting a paper called "Women in Comics: Reconsidering the Origins of Shojo Manga in the Postwar" at the 2016 national conference of the Popular Culture Association in Seattle next March. This presentation will draw on the in-progress third chapter of my dissertation and will be my first chance to take the material out for a spin.

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BCNM Summer Fellowship Dispatches

2015-09-09T10:03:12Z

I sent a short report back to the Berkley Center for New Media talking about how I used their generous funding to go to Kyoto for research. Taking selfies with the Manga Museum's mascot was entirely a bonus, I assure you--though it's practically par for the course in my research, I have to say. I've certainly been having a lot of fun while doing it, anyway.

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Sirens 2015: Revolutionaries

2015-09-05T12:02:41Z

I'm really looking forward to returning to the Sirens Conference this year. Sirens has been one of my favorite cons since I first attended in 2010, and I'm very happy to say that I'll be on a panel at this one, the theme of which (Revolutionaries) is very close to my heart:

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The Ada Initiative, again

2015-08-04T14:37:13Z

I suspect many people have already seen the announcement that the Ada Initiative is shutting down in approximately mid-October. My tweets have said what I feel on the subject, but to repeat at somewhat greater length: I'm proud of what TAI has accomplished over the past four years, and it's been a privilege to be a part of it as an AdaCamp attendee, a donor, an advisor, and last but not least, and far too briefly, a member of the board of directors. I said in my previous post that I was looking forward to supporting TAI's work; that support turned out to be rather in the spirit of "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him," but we made the right decision. For me, the meat of the question is in just two sentences:

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And now, for my next trick…

2015-07-28T13:22:57Z

I'm thrilled and flattered to report, belatedly, that I received a fellowship from UC Berkeley and the Université Libre de Bruxelles to spend two months in Belgium at the end of this year researching the development of Franco-Belgian comics, i.e. bandes dessinées. I was interviewed about my research briefly for the news section of Berkeley's Graduate Division. I spent about four days in Belgium last summer--just enough time to see the BD museum and Bruges, and not much else--and I'm looking forward to going back.

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Inspire campaign: results!

2015-05-17T11:40:58Z

I don't believe I mentioned that I was invited to serve on the reviewers committee for the Inspire campaign, a Wikimedia Foundation effort to increase gender diversity on Wikipedia and its related projects through funding community-proposed efforts. It was interesting to be on the committee side of things, and I certainly learned a lot. You can read more about the grantees and their projects at the WMF blog post.

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News: Ada Initiative Board of Directors

2015-05-12T13:06:14Z

I'm thrilled to be joining the Board of the Directors of the Ada Initiative as Secretary, starting immediately. TAI is an organization with which I've been honored to associate, and I look forward to the opportunity to work with the rest of the Board and the TAI staff to help contribute to and support its continuing success.

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OTW Fundraising Drive

2015-05-06T14:04:56Z

I'm in just under the wire, Tokyo time, with a note about the OTW's first 2015 fundraising drive. It's that time of year again when we ask people to support our work supporting fans and fanworks by donating to the organization. This is your chance to ensure that we're able to continue doing and improving our work, and as someone who's been involved with the OTW for a good long while now, I can assure you that your support is very much appreciated. We've come a long way thanks to you, and thanks to you, we'll keep going even further in 2015 and beyond.

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Only now am I kicking myself for not getting bubble tea

2015-04-28T10:41:29Z

I went back to California two weeks ago for the Media & Transmission graduate conference hosted by the Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley. Many thanks to the organizers for all their hard work, and for funding my travel so that I could participate in a conference geared towards a theme that is close to my dissertation. The abstract for my talk, "A Children’s Empire: The Club Magazines and the Prewar 'Media Mix',” is also available on the website, and is drawn from what will eventually be chapter two of my dissertation. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to discuss my research amongst a Japan-knowledable but animanga-context-light audience, and also really enjoyed my fellow panelists' talks. It was a very productive week back, all in all, though I have to admit I'm still jet-lagged.

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Brief notes on Kajii Jun's Tore, yôchô no jû to pen

2015-03-23T11:02:56Z

This book is probably the first non-fiction Japanese book I ever attempted to read, back when I was on a Fulbright in Kyoto from 2007-08. I was writing about contemporary hypernationalist manga, and Kajii was one of the few writers I could find with my then-resources who talked about wartime manga in depth. I couldn't really read Japanese at the point, but I didn't let that stop me. Seven years later, I read the whole book in a few days, an amount of time which before would have netted me only a few pages, and I can say that part of the problem I had back then is that Kajii's prose is kind of opaque. Unlike Shimizu Isao, he doesn't write in a conversational style, and he uses a lot of uncommon words. So it was still slow going, even now that I'm literate, and it took me about half the book before Kajii's prose style clicked in my mind and I was able to start skimming with more confidence.

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Brief notes on Shimizu Isao's Manga tanjô: Taisho democracy kara no shuppatsu

2015-03-03T11:44:49Z

Shimizu Isao is probably the most famous "manga historian" in Japan, though this book (1999) isn't an academic text, much to my frustration: there are no citations beyond the dates and original publications of the images, and Shimizu displays the usual tics of Japanese scholarly writing that are deeply infuriating to someone trained in the more rigorous American style, especially his habit of making claims about what people thought with absolutely no evidence to back it up, and his habit of going on pointless tangents (such as his talking about his trip to Egypt by way of an introduction to how professional cartoonists portrayed women in the era of imperial democracy).

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Borderlands

2015-02-03T07:24:19Z

I am so terribly sorry to hear that after 18 years, Borderlands Books in San Francisco will be closing by the end of next month. The news leaked on Twitter Sunday night Tokyo time, and I sat there in shock for a good five minutes when I saw it.

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Planning Wiscon 40

2014-12-04T01:45:44Z

Well, the cat's out of the bag; my friend s.e. smith and I are co-chairing Wiscon 40 in 2016, the 40th iteration of the world's leading science fiction convention held in Madison, WI every Memorial Day weekend.

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Notes on Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe

2014-11-30T13:33:35Z

In my quest to gather all of my dissertation notes and outlines into one centrally located place in digitized format, I've come across some interesting things in the depths of my Evernote notebooks. The draft text for my remarks at Fred Schodt's book talk last year is one of the more interesting ones, and I thought I'd share it here.

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Notes from the road

2014-11-19T13:35:30Z

I've had quite a year for travel, and I wanted to take the time to share two write-ups of events I attended this year that, I thought, did a good job of discussing the events in question from a balanced perspective.

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Notes from research

2014-11-18T13:47:39Z

In honor of spending part of today looking at issues from the first 25 years of Osaka Puck in the National Diet Library, tonight I translated the Japanese Wikipedia article on the magazine. There's no article on Tokyo Puck in either language, remarkably, but writing that is a task for another time, probably after I've drafted the first chapter of my dissertation.

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