Visual Studies
This PhD thesis analyzes digital and data-based practices of mediation of art and culture, focusing on digital cultural repositories and databases as central mediation tools. It embeds the digital mediation practices discussed in this thesis in the media-theoretical and media-historic context of the transformation processes that have taken place in the digital media ecology, which have resulted in challenges for cultural institutions and museums, both in their role as institutions as well as in their daily mediation work. The thesis also situates digital mediation practices in the context of contemporary, analog practices of cultural learning, since the analog and digital realms can no longer be separated in the contemporary media ecology.
One central topic of the analysis is mapping and understanding practices of mediation of art and culture and cultural learning in the digital realm. This is based on the database as a cultural form and repository that defines what can be said and known about a culture or society. The analysis introduces digital and data-based meaning-making processes within databases and database-interfaces themselves as well as cultural learning processes that reuse and contextualize the data in learning resources or by forming new experiences with them. The analysis concentrates mainly on web-based approaches and treats the process of co-creative knowledge generation as a central mode of the mediation of art and culture, using the paradigm of Software Studies developed by Lev Manovich as a lens for analysis.
Moreover, the thesis examines what characteristics of contemporary digital media and the digital media ecology are reflected or play an important role in digital, data-based mediation practices. It raises the question as to whether the employment of digital data leads to a changed notion of what mediation of art and culture can accomplish and highlights central directions for museums to react to and take advantage of ongoing digitization.
In a country of ongoing conflict like Lebanon, war comics constitute about half of the national comics production, representing an emerging market share of the publishing sector in the country. It is said that Lebanon suffered a 'state of amnesia' after the 1975-1990 Civil War; something which has turned into a 'state-sponsored amnesia'. However, civic movements have been initiating debates around the war, its consequences, and its results as it monopolizes a large part of the cultural production in the country. Indeed, a big portion of recent Lebanese comics contributes that debate. This study examines the large narrative corpus of these particular comics with the interest on the narrative strategies used to tell the violence of war. The system of comics and its narrativity were visualized to facilitates the application of its analysis. The visualization is an analytical interface that enables the annotation and the mapping of comics using the visual, the linguistic and the spatial modes of comics. The interface, called Amphibian, enables the analysis of narratological elements such as events and characters – the focus of the thesis focuses. A survey of thematic reoccurrences was conducted on all the pages of the corpus revealing significant violent events and armed men. Both multimodal and narrative analysis were used to extract the narratives of war from the comics material. Visualization was also used to dissect and map the icono-textual constituents and accommodate the linear and tabular deployment of the comics. A mapping of 'men/guns' was applied, and narratives of war were extracted and analyzed. A chronology of the warfare events and their focalization, and the character's identity and agency, determined the nature of the graphic narratives and their contribution to the war debate.
