Virtual Posters
Asynchronous Session
Meteor Garden: Traveling Across Time and Space Through a Drama
Poster Session Shu Ling Chen Berggreen
As fictional narratives are usually based somewhat on reality, fictions can reflect how we conceptualize reality. In the process of globalization, many fiction-based cultural products, such as mangas and dramas, have been adapted into a multitude of new texts, though with various degrees of commonalities, circulating in a wide range of markets regionally and globally. Through this route, concepts and ideologies can travel across time and space. This study follows the curious journey of Boys Over Flowers, a Japanese manga first published in 1992, reborn as Meteor Garden (a 2001 pan-Asian hit TV drama from Taiwan), a 2009 Korean remake of the TV drama (titled Boys Over Flowers), and a 2018 remake of Meteor Garden in China, an unprecedented pan-Asian hit that triggered more remakes of the drama across Southeast Asia. Based on the notion of traveling concepts and ideas, the project analyzes how, through various adaptations, values transcend geographical boundaries yet simultaneously reflect local socio-cultural contexts. While the drama's ability to enhance cultural exchange should be celebrated, one mustn’t ignore another force at play. For example, the inclusion of product placement in this drama seems to be consistent across all adaptations, no matter the origins. Scripts are inevitably modified to weave sponsors’ products into the storylines. It appears that cultural production can’t escape the power of commercialization and capitalism. Can we, and how should we, preserve timeless popular media productions as cultural products with meaningful social contexts without surrendering them to the power of global capital?
Travel of Literature Enabled by Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models: The Personalization of Literary Quotes
Poster Session Kay Li
The aim of this study is to examine how artificial intelligence, especially large language models, can enable literature to travel across cultural and geographical boundaries, and be personalized by the diverse readers around the world. With the pervasive internet, massive volumes of literature are now available online, but the increase in accessibility may not have a directly correlation to its being actually accessed. The more likely accessed are the literary quotes, taken out of context only as texts, without reference to any national, temporal and disciplinary contexts. These literary quotes are words taken not only out of their literary context, but also out of their cultural and geographic contexts. What remains are often the textual features, often presented as inspirational quotes ready to be adapted by the readers in their own context. Our recent pilot project showed that to enable global readers to comprehend the meaning of the literary quote, the quote needs to be coded so that they can be decoded by global readers using their own experience and cultural backgrounds. This brings earlier concepts such as cultural exchanges, globalization, transnationalism and interdependences to another level. We used artificial intelligence and large language models to analyse literary quotes, extracting the sentiments inherent in these quotes, and re-wrapped them in visual elements prepared by artificial intelligence, so that the meaning of the quotes in their original literary context can be understood by the readers without the literary and cultural contexts. The literary quotes are personalized and made inclusive.
