A photo of the shelf referenced for this project. It contains a collection of fictional manga works that was translated to English and rereleased into the west. I was drawn to it due to the fact it contained "Akira" by Katsuhiro Otomo. Please check it out after this. I know you saw that one scene out of context.
For this project, we were tasked with finding a physical shelf within the library of Penn State Behrend that contained a topic to research. We then found these books to archive by using Zotero to capture the web archives of these titles from the Penn State Libraries website. Then we found some more books from the a similar shelf code within other libraries. Finally we exported the raw data to Palladio and analyzed the now visualized data it returned. The un-visualized, raw .csv file can be found here.
I chose the topic of fictional manga works due to my fasination with the country of Japan and its culture/entertainment. I set out a goal to collect what was archived and learn more about it. The original Zotero Group containing these captures can be found here.
A timeline of when these versions of the archived works were published.
From what can be gathered from this exported timeline and the raw data, the works that were found ranged from the late 1980s to as recent as 2023. The majority of works were published between the late 2000s to the late 2010s. There also appears to be about a 10 year gap from the early 90s to 2005. It wouldn't be there if the two untranslatedd outliers from the last century wasn't archived.
A SVG graph of works sorted by publisher.
From what can be seen from this graph, VIZ Media was responsible for publishing the majority of translated works. The only publishers that are tied for 2nd place is Kodansha Comics and Shueisha with 2 published works each. This leaves 4 other publishers with only one pubished work for the shelf and its alternate contemporaries.
A SVG graph of works sorted by location.
According to this graph, despite most if not all of these works originating from Japanese creators as the location data archived from Zotero is of these English translations/reformattings of these original work. For example, "Akira" by Katsuhiro Otomo was first published in the 1980s in Japan. It didn't show up there in the timeline because this is an official English translation/modification by Kodansha Comics that was published in New York in the year 2009. With that in mind, the majority of archived rereleases were published in San Fransisco, California. All of those by VIZ media. 4 translated works were published in New York. "Okinawa" was the only found work both published in Seattle, Washington and by Fantagraphics Books.
The one that stands out the most would be "Kafka", which was rereleased by Pushkin Press in London. The only translated work rereleased in another continent, Europe. With this knowlage of how media comes to the West, it explains why most captures was not recorded to be from the East. However, Chibi Maruko-chan and Suramu danku =: Slam dunk were both recorded to be from Tōkyō. That's most likely due to these books being the original Japanese works. Looking further into it, Zotero brought over the translated names for these books during the archival process (Ex: ちびまる子ちゃん / さくらももこ and スラムダンク = Slam dunk / 井上雄彦 respectively). Both works were found with the same Behrend shelf code within different libraries. Just goes to show that the same shelf in different places can have different flavors of the same medium to offer. Hope you know how to read it.
Zotero Group .CSV File