Understanding Scanlation: How to read one million fan-translated manga pages
Co-authors: Jeremy Douglass, William Huber.
Excerpt:
Our most ambitious project to date is exploration of an image set of one million manga pages. These pages correspond to 883 manga series that were available as “scanlations” (manga digitized and translated by fans) on OneManga.com in the fall 2009. At that time we downloaded all pages available on the site, along with the user-assigned tags indicating the genres and intended audiences for the series. We then analyzed visual features of these pages using custom digital image analysis software that we developed and then ran on supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). (This part of the project was funded by a Humanities High-Performance Computing grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities.)