Narrative Nuance
(Asynchronous Session - Online)
Neoliberalism, Ideology, and Public Discourse: A Study of Meaning and Communicative Transformations in Large Volumes of Empirical Data in Political and Journalistic Texts with Automatic Analysis Methods View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katerina Mandenaki, Catherine Sotirakou
The explosive growth of the Web as well as the increasing availability of content and resources, such as articles, blogs, publications, reviews, books create a heterogeneous and continuously increasing information reality that offers unlimited possibilities. Especially in the field of discourse analysis, the need to develop automated techniques for locating, extracting, and analyzing patterns and meanings in big textual data is of paramount importance. How can we utilize modern computational methods of text mining to identify concepts and track their semantic formation and their establishment as “common sense” in public discourse? How are specific ideological stereotypes being reproduced by the media? The proposed research attempts an empirical analysis of large textual data with innovative computational tools that process and query texts within a highly debated field: neoliberalism and the financialization of public discourse. We created a novel neoliberal corpus comprised by blogs and articles derived from the websites of four known and theory acknowledged institutions of neoliberal orientation and a body of classical neoliberal theorists which allowed for a twofold approach: a theory driven detection of structural elements of ideology and language and a data driven approach of feature extraction and domain specific concepts to create effective models and extract information that may elude the scrutiny of qualitative analysis and its small textual data. Our implementation of state-of-the-art algorithms and natural language processing libraries showed very promising results in exploring new ways social science may exploit big data.
Playing Socio-political Games: Medium for Social Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alba García Martínez
This study is part of the doctoral research development. We outline the most relevant reasons for this research, as well as the hypotheses that supports it. We also review the study frame and the current point where this research is located. In tandem, the workshop is mostly focused on the direct practice. We lay some political games created and exhibited in NEGOCIO Exhibition as the analogue NeoDixit by Jc Izquierdo, Atiz & Alba Refulgente or the digital Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th. Finally, we will discuss how appropriate and effective the game is in art for communicating some issues. Games and art have crossed, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, as we see in the use of the Exquisite Corpse of the Surrealists, in Duchamp’s obsession with chess and in the Fluxus games boxes. During the last twenty years, the separation between games and art has dissipated as much for the artists as for the creators of games. The field in which games and art have converged, superimposed, collided, found and, above all, interacted has not yet been widely explored. This research is about finding new ways of thinking about games, new ways to use games to think about the rest of the world. How games can contribute as an artistic medium and how art can subvert the order of the power of games.
Representing Hyper-/In-visibility: How Visual Discourse Can Conceal or Challenge the Human Rights Abuses of Deindustrialization in Media Avoidance Zones View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mattius Rischard, Gloria McMillan
Technologies for encoding and visualizing information, from the paperback novel to the digital map, far from critiquing culture and knowledge, provide us with superficial and indiscriminate information, such that a medium's potential for increasing democratic participation, individual autonomy, and community sovereignty is related to ways that users can format, stylize, and interpret the representations of information. In a space as complex as the American city, the codes used to represent it reveal how the selective visibility of marginal spaces has both individual and socio-political implications for (resisting) control over the movement of urban bodies and identities. For instance, an urban “Media Avoidance Zone” like Gary, IN has diverged from its historically "quaint" popular representation in the score of The Music Man to monikers including “The Chernobyl-on-Lake-Michigan.” These MAZ's are the representational spaces manufactured by mass media to foreground a neoliberal sensibility in its essentialized difference from the supposedly impoverished culture of the deindustrialized city. In contrast to popular representations, the Flowers For Gary project, Gloria McMillan’s All The Old Familiar Places, Thomas Frank’s Toxic Tour of East Chicago, and the Arts+Action Community Lab are aesthetically-situated instances demonstrating how MAZ-based visual narratives and discursivity does not merely condemn oppression and erasure, it negates the the stereotypes constructed as a foil to the ideal suburban citizen/audience of the media. Moreover, such works facilitate conversations between larger support networks and the MAZ for articulating human rights abuses engendered by rhetorically "red-lining" the MAZ’s creative element while rendering the urban damage imagery hypervisible.
Immersive Global Middle Ages: Exploring Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Life in Medieval Plasencia (España) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Roger Louis Martinez Davila
At the academic intersections of medievalism(s), multidisciplinary epistemologies, and globalization, we propose that the Middle Ages were not only a Western European and Christian experience, but one that was global, interconnected, culturally diverse, and with many centers of cultural and political authority. Crucial to the invigoration of the study of the medieval globe is the “digital turn” in scholarship and application of digital humanities approaches that implement immersive experiences – digitally-constructed virtual reality worlds where a user can explore, evaluate, and contemplate the nature of life in historical places and times. Immersive environments include 2D, 3D, virtual reality, and augmented reality environments. Using SketchUp Pro software and Oculus Rift headsets, we recreated the Jewish quarter (judería) and other elements of the early 15th century city of Plasencia, which was under the ecclesiastical control of the blended Carvajal-Santa María family of conversos and Old Christians (cristianos viejos). SketchUp Pro allows humanities researchers and their students to create original digital artifacts (objects, devices, architecture and structures, terrain, persons, flora and fauna) and to generate realistic cityscapes and historical communities. Moreover, by embedding digital dioramas of the inter-religious and economic relations of the three religious groups, we center the viewer's visual attention on these relationships and demonstrate that VR is an equally valid form of historical representation in relation to the book (text).
Tools for Thinking in the Digital Humanities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Matysek
Digital tools should play a significant role in the Digital Humanities, making it easier for scientists to cope with the challenges of the modern world where the number of products of human thought, mainly in digital form, is continuously and exponentially increasing. In the paper, we consider digital tools and opportunities to use them in humanities scholars' work in making, exploring, and thinking. We focus on modern note-taking apps used for thinking as 'instruments of discovery'. Such tools give the possibility of making creative connections between them (using internal and bi-directional links and visualizations of links), advanced search, gaining and accumulating knowledge. Through these capabilities, scientific notes can be thought of as conversations with oneself in the future.
