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Webtoons are fast cementing their place as a new sector of the digital media industries, with interest in this niche comic form increasing on a monthly basis across a range of platforms. To clarify this transformation, this article investigates the popular webtoon Cheese in the Trap, as well as its television series and film remakes, to illustrate the transmedia flows and participatory culture that underpin the extension of this new ‘IP-engine’. Next, it investigates the previously unrecognized contributions that fan translators – or what the authors call ‘transcreators’ – are making to the global spread of this format on Line Webtoon, the largest platform of its kind. The authors build on some significant previous studies – albeit with limited scope – by analyzing how webtoon series and the big data linked to them are transformed across multiple formats and platforms, how they are received by fans, and how cultural intermediaries are amplifying the impact and global spread of webtoons.

Since the early 2000s, the Korean Wave (aka Hallyu) has influenced Greater China in enterprising and complex ways that diverge from the ways in which Hallyu has impacted other markets. At the same time, since China joined the Word Trade Organization in 2001, art, culture and media production have been largely transformed from vehicles for state propaganda into new gateways for producing and showcasing popular commercial entertainment. Korean producers have played a significant role in this evolving transformation, albeit in a cultural space that the Government of Mainland China still uses and shapes as an important mouthpiece of the Party-state. While media headlines accentuate these progressive pathways, there is a dearth of scholarly commentary on the ways in which Korean film practitioners are contributing to this new era of cultural globalisation in China. To shed light on this emerging topic, the authors examine Chinese audiences’ reception of the Korean film Miss Granny (2014) and the most successful Korean–Chinese co-production to date, its Chinese remake 20 Once Again (2015). The article utilises data drawn from Douban, a major Chinese entertainment and popular culture social networking site, to assess the ‘inconspicuous’ impact of the cinematic component of the Korean Wave on Chinese cinema. In taking this approach, the authors seek to assess the importance of localized film content for Chinese audiences, as well as canvassing a range of hitherto unknown opinions about ‘Korean’ and ‘Chinese’ styles of storytelling.

This panel investigates how complex layers of trust and (dis)trust are surrounding and impacting on the fans, also known as ‘cultural intermediaries’, involved in the production, circulation, translation and remake of Korean and Chinese webtoon and webnovel platforms in Asia and among Asian users. Collectively, the panellists argue for a reconceptualisation of the concept of ‘Internet platform’. In so doing, we interrogate the concepts of ‘platformization’, ‘platform capitalism’ and ‘digital capitalism’ by asking: how, and with what effect, Korean and Chinese digital platforms – as well as their aggregated domestic and international users, are operating in the Asia Pacific, compared to more global ‘liberal’ platforms? Noting the activities of ‘digital champions’, such as the giant Korean search portal Naver, as well as China’s Kuaikan and Bilibili enterprises, which are now rapidly emerging in the shadows of their larger competitors: iQiyi (Baidu), Taobao (Alibaba), QQ (Tencent), collectively known as BAT. In sum, we show which Korean and Chinese webtoon and webnovel platforms are taking root in various regional territories and among regional audiences. Our intent is to illustrate how digital platforms (i.e. the globality of the internet) are refashioning the image of Korea and China, which is often viewed outside of their national borders as driven by an ideologically-free ‘broadband nirvana’ (Goldsmith et al. 2011), and tainted by authoritarian state, respectively. Accordingly, all four papers will consider how platform capitalism offers new ways to understand the outreach of both Korean and Chinese digital culture – from both economic and technological viewpoints.

In conventional metamorphic testing, metamorphic relations (MRs) are identified as necessary properties of a computer program's intended functionality, whereby violations of MRs reveal faults in the program---under the assumption that the source and follow-up inputs (test cases used in metamorphic testing) are valid. In the present study, the authors argue that MRs can also be used to validate and assess the quality of the program's input data---under the assumption that the source or follow-up inputs can be inappropriately generated. Using this new perspective, a case study in the natural language processing domain is used to explore the different types of text messages that are difficult to interpret by (Chinese-English) machine translation. A total of 46,180 short user comments on Personal Tailor (a 2013 Chinese film), collected from Douban (a popular Chinese social media platform), has been used as the primary dataset of this study, and the analysis of results demonstrates that the proposed MR-based data validation method is useful for the automatic identification of poorly translated text messages.

Official film co-production treaties are designed by policymakers to stimulate a range of collaborations, technology transfers, and joint funding initiatives in the industry. Since July 2004, the Chinese government has used this top-down approach to cultural diplomacy as a symbolic tool for advancing Chinese cinema and opening the domestic market to a host of willing international partners. Korean filmmakers in particular have exploited the (often informal) opportunities presented, engaging in vigorous cooperation with Chinese colleagues across all sectors of the production ecosystem. The continuing flow of Chinese–Korean transnational film encounters, underpinned by influential personal networks, resulted in the signing of a formal China–Korea co-production agreement in July 2014. To examine the efficacy of this policy intervention, this article analyzes the diversity of film collaboration that preceded this agreement and its impact on transnational filmmaking in China. It investigates the strategies use...

With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and its inevitable consequences in education, increased demand for robust online learning frameworks has occurred at all levels of the education system. Given the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, there have been determined attempts through the design and application of intelligent tools to overcome existing challenges in online learning platforms. Accordingly, educational providers and researchers are investigating and developing intelligent online learning environments which share greater commonalities with real-world classroom conditions in order to better meet learners' needs. However, short attention spans and the widespread use of smart devices and social media bring about new e-learning systems known as microlearning (ML). While there has been ample research investigating ML and developing micro-content, pedagogical challenges and a general lack of alternative frameworks, theories and practices still exist. The present models have little to say about the connections between social interaction, including learner–content, learner–instructor and learner–learner communication. This has prompted us to investigate the complementary aspects of Computer-supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) as an interactive learning model, along with an embedded ML module in the design and development of a comprehensive learning platform. The purpose of this study is to explore the pedagogical frameworks and challenges with reference to interaction and retention in online learning environments, as well as the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of ML and its applications. In addition, we delve into the theories and principles behind CSCL, the main elements in CSCL, identifying the issues and challenges to be faced in improving the efficacy of collaboration processes and outcomes. In short, we aim to synthesize how microlearning and CSCL can be applied as effective modules within a comprehensive online learning platform, thereby offering STEM educators a relevant roadmap towards progress that has yet to be offered in previous studies.

This article explores the trajectory of Song Kang-ho’s on-screen performances from the release of his fourth film, Number 3 (1997), to one of his most recent films, Thirst (2009). As a case study, it reveals new insights about this popular and representative actor’s numerous screen personae and how they have enabled audiences to peer into a cinematic surface that reflects back a mixture of anti-heroism and pantomime. Beneath the many costumes and performance styles he adopts, audiences have come to see a human being with everyday problems and concerns. In a way reminiscent of the French pantomime clown Pierrot, Song’s characters reflect a depth of human feeling and compassion modulated by a comic undercurrent—the tension between these overlapping layers is precisely what holds his various personae together.

Analysis of online user-generated content is receiving attention for its wide applications from both academic researchers and industry stakeholders. In this pilot study, we address common Big Data problems of time constraints and memory costs involved with using standard single-machine hardware and software. A novel Big Data processing framework is proposed to investigate a niche subset of user-generated popular culture content on Douban, a well-known Chinese-language online social network. Huge data samples are harvested via an asynchronous scraping crawler. We also discuss how to manipulate heterogeneous features from raw samples to facilitate analysis of various film details, review comments, and user profiles on Douban with specific regard to a wave of South Korean films (2003–2014), which have increased in popularity among Chinese film fans. In addition, an improved Apriori algorithm based on MapReduce is proposed for content-mining functions. An exploratory simulation of results demonstrates the flexibility and applicability of the proposed framework for extracting relevant information from complex social media data, knowledge which can in turn be extended beyond this niche dataset and used to inform producers and distributors of films, television shows, and other digital media content.

Between 1926 and 1936, cinema in colonial Korea was a vibrant business, involving the production of domestic films and the distribution and exhibition of American, British, Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Russian films. During this decade, the first golden age of American cinema in Korea, Hollywood films overwhelmingly dominated the Korean market. Korea was an important territory that Hollywood used in its overall global expansion campaign. Amid this globalization operation, the Government-General of Chōsen’s film censorship apparatus was a financially self-sustaining operation. It paid for its operation by profiteering from the application of more than 6,700 American and 630 other countries’ feature and nonfeature films, a vast majority of which were approved with minor, if any, censorship changes. The Government-General’s systematization of film censorship policies was intended to obstruct Communist, revolutionary, and later, socialist themes rather than “Western” themes—at least until the late 1930s, when the Japanese Department of Home Affairs began banning the import of American films and the Government-General intensified the suppression of Korean culture.

For critics of the Disney Corporation, the World Wide Web is a convenient medium for providing information and expressing concern. The majority of anti–Disney Web sites are run by either Christian or labour rights organisations as utilitarian adjuncts to offline campaigns. In contrast are a number of idiosyncratic individual anti–Disney sites that provide links to criticism from a variety of perspectives. The Web appears to facilitate this type of cross–issue critique. On the other hand, some forms of opposition to Disney, such as by employees and corporate competitors, are largely absent from the Web. Assessing challenges to a corporation by examining Web sites is likely to give a partial picture.