Affordances, remediation, and digital mourning: A comparative case study of two AIDS memorials

2020 ◽  
pp. 175069801989468
Author(s):  
Spencer P Cherasia
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Digital Repository ◽  
Collaborative Project ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
Aids Memorial Quilt ◽  
Names Project

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is a collaborative project that memorializes individuals who have died of AIDS-related causes. Since its inception, it has become the world’s largest public folk art project. Scholars have noted the Quilt’s materiality, scope, and cultural importance to collective memory processes related to HIV/AIDS. More recently, discussions of collective memory in the digital public sphere have attracted attention from new media theorists and memory scholars alike. @theAIDSmemorial (TAM) is an Instagram account that serves as a digital repository for a new form of connective memory. By assessing two AIDS memorials as comparative cases, this research argues that TAM’s digital affordances of interactivity and reach are evident, although in assessing the digital remediation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the materiality, metaphoric origins, and scope of the Quilt cannot be rendered on digital platforms, representing a loss in affective engagement.

scholarly journals Public Space at the “Palm of a Hand”: Perceptions of Urban Projects Through Digital Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 242-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byron Ioannou ◽  
Gregoris Kalnis ◽  
Lora Nicolaou
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
The Way

This article examines the interactions between digital and social media as the contemporary incubators of place perceptions and the critical debate of environmental quality. Digital and social media may change the way people live but not the way they use physical spaces. This indirect reading of place acts in terms of perceptual understanding in a number of ways, but, most importantly, it becomes fundamental in the “construction” of the sense of place. This is because it impacts on the way information is associated with reality or a contract of the reality which is generated through its “interference” with our intellectual and emotive understanding of place. At the same time, the politics of a new “sociality” contains participations and exclusions. The article adopts comparative case study research as the methodological approach for investigating notions of how urban space is perceived through the case study of Eleftheria Square in Nicosia, a controversial urban regeneration project that generated an extensive debate through digital and social media in Cyprus during the last two decades. It is an attempt of a parallel decoding of (i) a more formal or directive view through digital newspapers’ survey and (ii) an informal view through a Facebook group content analysis. Through the case study, the inefficiencies and potentialities of the new media tools in informing the wider public are clear by providing at the same time evidence of their priorities, preferences, and fears. The article comes to two basic conclusions: (i) the perceptions of urban projects through digital media are not static but fluent and constantly updated, usually turning positive as projects are completed and experienced; and (ii) the interactive and synchronous nature of social media provides a more accurate and updated picture of the society’s changing perceptions of public space.

scholarly journals Sports broadcasting, journalism and the challenge of new media

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (53) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Kirsten Frandsen
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Platform ◽  
Sports Events ◽  
Sports Broadcasting

<p>This article explores the challenge faced by established media organisations integrating digital media in their production. Using a case study of a Danish broadcaster’s use of blogs in their coverage of major sports events, it is argued that the challenge is strategic in a broader sense, as the move to digital platforms is influenced by economic, organisational as well as conceptual parameters for roles. It is argued that in order to understand the potential and challenges of this case, the peculiarities of the role of sports journalists in broadcasting have to be taken into consideration. The case illustrates how their distinctive engagement with their topic and the audience makes some of them more prone to work for pleasure and produce for the digital platform on very unclear conditions, just as it influences the interaction that takes place in the blogs in various ways.</p>

CONTEXTUALIZING PALIMPSEST OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN AN URBAN HERITAGE SITE: Case Study of Chahar Bagh, Shiraz - Iran

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Mahmoudi Farahani ◽  
Marzieh Setayesh ◽  
Leila Shokrollahi
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Urban Heritage ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
A Site ◽  
Historical Centre

A landscape or site, which has been inhabited for long, consists of layers of history. This history is sometimes reserved in forms of small physical remnants, monuments, memorials, names or collective memories of destruction and reconstruction. In this sense, a site/landscape can be presumed as what Derrida refers to as a “palimpsest”. A palimpsest whose character is identified in a duality between the existing layers of meaning accumulated through time, and the act of erasing them to make room for the new to appear. In this study, the spatial collective memory of the Chahar Bagh site which is located in the historical centre of Shiraz will be investigated as a contextualized palimpsest, with various projects adjacent one another; each conceptualized and constructed within various historical settings; while the site as a heritage is still an active part of the city’s cultural life. Through analysing the different layers of meaning corresponding to these adjacent projects, a number of principals for reading the complexities of similar historical sites can be driven.

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