Views and Viewpoints
Semiotics of Visualisation in Comparative Literature: The Case of the NEWW Women Writers Database
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aleš Vaupotič, Narvika Bovcon
The paper discusses the methodology behind the visualisation of information. It points out the visual language strategies for encoding meaning and the importance of spatial arrangement of information. An overview of visualisation models is conceived on multiple levels, categorising the various forms of diagrams according to several approaches. Experimental data visualisations, among them also dynamic, interactive and three-dimensional visualisations, were realised in the project on the NEWW database with the goal to explore possible uses of different diagrams and graphs to make the structures and patterns in more apparent. These prototypes facilitate a hands-on evaluation of individual visualisation solutions with regard to this particular database. Focused research questions are recognised as a productive starting point for comprehensible although partial visualisations of the database. Our approach relies upon Lev Manovich's definition of a new media object as a multiplicity of interfaces to access a multimedia database. A selection of visualisations that were created within the project is presented to point to particular communication situations, and possible problems that we encountered. A humanities database containing literary-historical information requires a specific approach that adapts and sometimes replaces the statistical data descriptions as used in hard sciences and social sciences. Also, using the Peircean semiotics as the methodological framework we point to the need to specify the scope of the visualisation project and its communicative effect. In the second part of the paper, we interpret the semiotic functioning of data sculptures that were realised using the contents of the NEWW database.
The Digital Expansion: Creating Digital Working Communities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chy Na Nellon
Inspired from research by Andre Brock, Angel David Nieves, Kate Nash,Tim Gruenewald, and Saskia Witteborn this study seeks to further understand the relationships between cultural/digital media archival practice as well as the general expansive reach of ‘the digital’ and how that shows up in cultural studies and various intersecting fields including but not limited to Pan African Studies, World Languages and Literatures, Digital Humanities, Computer Science, Game Design and Folklore - as well as classroom collaborative practices using platforms such as Padlet and Miro.
"Un Spectacle D'Apocalypse": War, Race, Fascism, and Other Assorted "Thorns in the Eye" in the Films of Sam Fuller View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Bates
My title comes from a French review of Emil Weiss’s 1989 documentary Falkenau, Vision de l’Impossible in which maverick filmmaker Sam Fuller narrates his involvement as a combat infantryman with the 1st infantry division (aka “The Big Red One”), focusing in particular on his participation at the liberation of the death camp at Falkenau. The “apocalypse” in question is the one Fuller witnessed in the camp, later fictionalized in his war epic The Big Red One (1980). However, the French reviewer refers not directly to those events but to the reel of film Fuller shot in the camp, documenting an interment ceremony in which the leading citizens of Falkenau prepare the bodies of the camp’s victims for decent burial, footage shot under orders from his battalion commander Capt. Richmond. This then is the “impossible vision” referenced in the title of Weiss’ documentary, a ritual recorded for posterity with the hand-cranked camera that Fuller had received as a gift from his mother back in the States, footage subsequently entitled V-E+1, and inducted into the National Film Registry in 2014. I argue that it is this “spectacle,” not the spectacle of the film per se but the one observed, unmediated, by the filmmaker, that provides the key to Fuller’s post-war films, irrespective of genre. With close reference to a select number of Fuller’s movies, I discuss how the “apocalypse” he witnessed shaped his attitude to war, race, ethno-nationalist ideologies, and totalitarian regimes.
