publications

Translation from 2B-dan in Mechademia 14.2

/ ahorbinski

I’m very pleased to say that the current issue of Mechademia: Second Arc contains a translation by me of a chapter from a book written by Yonezawa Yoshihiro and Shikijō Kyōtarō, 2B-dan: Gindama sensō no hibi (1983; Squad 2B: The days of the silver ball gun wars), specifically Chapter 3, “Putting a Hand into the Fountain of Knowledge.” Yonezawa of course is justly famous for his involvement with Comiket from its foundation when he was a college student to his death in 2006, and for the posthumous archive of his personal collection at Meiji University. This issue of Mechademia is themed around “New Foundations of the Otaku” and I’m very pleased to have found a home for the translation here–there are many great articles alongside my own contribution.

I was tipped off to the existence of this book by a Twitter user who has since apparently deleted their account. Never let anyone tell you that social media is exclusively bad.

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies + a book review

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I’m thrilled to announce that after years of work, very little of it done by me, the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies launched online this week. JAMS is an open access journal, which means you can read the whole thing online for free. Congratulations to Billy Tringali, the editor in chief, and to everyone else involved.

Included in the first issue is my review of the reprint of Adam L. Kern’s classic book Manga from the Floating World: Kibyôshi and the Comicbook Culture of Edo Japan. It’s very good to have this book back in print after so long, and I would definitely recommend it if you’re interested in the subject.

Article published in Internet Histories

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I’m delighted to announce that my article “Talking by letter: the hidden history of female media fans on the 1990s internet” is now available in Internet Histories. This article draws on the interviews I and my fellow investigators did for the Fan Fiction and Internet Memory oral history project in 2012, which was led by the excellent Prof. Abigail De Kosnik. If you haven’t read her book Rogue Archives, you totally should.

I want to thank again all the fans who participated in the interviews, as well as the many members of the FFIM and Fan Data research teams. Our collaboration was one of the highlights of my graduate career, and I’m very happy to be able to add this publication to those commemorating it. Many thanks as well to the editors of this special issue of Internet Histories, Valérie Schafer and Benjamin G. Thierry, for accepting this paper and helping to improve it through the revision process.