The degree zero of digital interfaces: a semiotics of audiovisual archives online

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Treleani
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Degree Zero ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital Heritage ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Audiovisual Archives

Abstract Interfaces have partially replaced editors. They now administer and have industrialized the processes of content circulation. Web platforms mediatize cultural memory and one example of this is that of online audiovisual archives which are a paradigmatic case involving interfaces mediating our image of the past. Therefore, their role as an enunciative framework is clearly worthy of thought and study. We will thus use a semiotic approach based on the starting hypothesis that digital interfaces shape our belief systems through a discursive framing of content to which they give access. By analyzing two case studies, we will argue that the transparency of interfaces appears to recall the notion of “mechanical objectivity” and thus refashion the reliability of the archives. However, a final counter-analysis of a document read in the framework of an on-site consultation invites us to reshape our considerations and enlarge the perspective from semiotic visual analysis to include the social processes linked to the publication of digital heritage.

scholarly journals On Memory of Plates and Dishes

Fluminensia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Western World ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

The aim of the article is to discuss how elements of food narratives meals and kitchen tools used for cooking are used in order to consolidate and shape the Croatian cultural memory, especially in the context of its Mediterranean heritage.For this reason, the texts by Veljko Barbieri, collected in the four volumes under the common and significant title Kuharski kanconijer. Gurmanska sjećanja Mediterana, are analysed. His circum-culinary narratives are a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge, references to historical and literary sources, personal memories and literary fiction. They can be easily inscribed in the Croatian (collective and individual) identity discourse since they are able to strengthen the collective (either national and supranational, or geo-regional) identity, and to construct the cultural memory. They also show Croatia's affiliation to the Western world along with its cultural-civilization rooting in antiquity, the Mediterranean region and Christianity, thus forming a part of the founding memory that develops a narrative about the very beginnings of Croatian presence on this land. The gastronomic narratives serve to create the cultural memory and this version of history which is to stabilize the social identity described by Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen. Through his stories, Barbieri shapes memory based on the representation of the past. In the analysed narratives, the memory carriers are dishes and plates which find reference to the oldest history of Croatia rendered by myths and other narratives. Associated with dishes, the pots enable the narrator to recall the past and the identity coded in individual dishes. They also participate in the processes of repeating, storage and remembering which generate a symbiotic relationship between man and thing. The memory carriers that is, food and plates depicted in Barbieri's culinary narratives do not convey their content in a neutral way, but construct their marked images.

scholarly journals Rola języka w uwalnianiu się z dziedzicznych traum

Politeja ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2(65)) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Marcol
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Village

The Role of Language in Releasing from Inherited Traumas. Negotiations of the Social Position of the Silesian Minority in Serbian Banat The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.

Analysing Visual Imagery: Connecting Semiotic and Cognitive Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
May L-Y Wong
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Conceptual Integration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Cognitive Perspectives

This article provides an exploratory study of a new analytical approach to examining visual imagery in relation to the underlying cognitive processes involved. The analytical approach combines social semiotic theory of representation with cognitive-linguistic studies on blending or conceptual integration. The author’s thesis is that visual-analytic tools suggested by the social semiotic approach perfectly complements the inward cognition of an image-viewer, a synergy which has rarely been envisaged by scholars from both disciplines. From this perspective, visual analysis is seen as both semiotically and cognitively relevant. The interdisciplinary approach developed in the article hopes to present new perspectives on the ways images are analysed and interpreted.

scholarly journals Veganism 2.0: Gastromania, nutrition, and digital communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 12-30
Author(s):  
Simona Stano
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Food Trends

The vegan population has risen significantly over the past decade, and is expected to continue increasing. Social media are believed to have played a major role in such a rise. According to a Google study (2018), veganism started to spread markedly in 2012, the same year that Instagram became popular, and has then grown in correlation with the expansion of the social network (with over 88 million #vegan posts out of a billion monthly active users and more than 500 million people using the platform daily today). Since 2016 conversations around veganism have increased also on Twitter, reaching nearly 20 million Tweets in 2018 and registering a further growth of 70% in 2019. Moreover, the number of Google searches for veganism has spiked from a popularity rating of just 17 out of 100 in 2008 to 88 in 2018. Functioning both as platforms for sharing and commenting on information and as effective channels for proselytizing, these and other social media have evidently extended the boundaries of the vegan movement, making it become one of the biggest contemporary food trends. This paper aims at identifying and describing the main cultural transformations and forms of life promoted by “veganism 2.0”, based on a semiotic approach particularly attentive to the analysis of the narrative level and the patemic dimension. To this purpose, the intersections between the so-called “gastromania” and other trends characterising contemporary foodspheres, such as “gastro-anomy” and the “ideology of nutritionism” are taken into account, paying particular attention to the gastronomic discourse in present-day digital mediascapes and the complex dynamics characterising them.

scholarly journals Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori A. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Burden Of Proof ◽  
International Community ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Violent Conflicts

AbstractThe conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.

Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav Cultural Memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology

Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Bošković
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Virtual Museum ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Intervention

Aleksandar Bošković argues that the Yugonostalgia in the Lexicon of Yu Mythology should be taken, not as a regressive idealization of the Yugoslav socialist past, but as a critical intervention in both the contemporary postsocialist politics of memory and the politics of emancipation. Bošković identifies the Lexicon as an exhibition catalogue of the virtual museum of all “things Yugoslav,” a self-reflective postmodern hybrid emerging from the semantic overlapping of different genres and threaded with various memories, per-Slavic Review 72, no. 1 (Spring 2013) sonal and collective, nostalgic and ironic, of everyday life in Yugoslav socialism. Bošković contends that by evoking visual and textual reflections on the meaning of the past for the present, the Lexicon appears to have a materiality akin to that of a ruin: it exhibits a blend of affectionate and ironic nostalgia for the Yugoslav past, while simultaneously performing and reaffirming the socialist modernity's prospective perspective as its emancipating impact on the social imagination.

scholarly journals Meditation in context: factors that facilitate prosocial behavior

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Condon
Keyword(s):  
Prosocial Behavior ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Context Factors ◽  
Contemplative Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Viable Approach ◽  
Relational Contexts

Contemplative science experienced tremendous growth in the past five years in part through new attention to the social processes and prosocial outcomes associated with meditation. Despite this growth, questions persist about the mechanisms and contexts through which meditation increases or fails to increase prosocial behavior. In this article, I draw on Buddhist traditions and empirical efforts to understand the ethical and relational contexts that promote prosocial behavior. In summary, meditation promises a viable approach to increase prosocial behavior, but future research will require a careful, holistic examination of contemplative contexts that foster those outcomes.

scholarly journals A representação do brasileiro nordestino nos filmes de cangaço

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Araujo Vilela
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brazilian Cinema ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Historical Movement ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
Or History

In the Northeast of Brazil, the “cangaço” phenomenon, which began in the 18th century and was more expressive between the end of the nineteenth century and the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, is a formative element of Northeastern culture, still inhabiting the imaginary of the inhabitants of theregion. This historical movement was portrayed in Brazilian cinema in different periods and in diff erent ways. The first films with this theme came from 1920. The question of the construction and reconstruction of the Historical Culture (Jörn Rüsen) of the Brazilian northeastern can be made through the communicative, social and cultural memory of the “cangaço” by the cinema. The films that portray the “cangaço”, some more realistic than others, claim to represent the history, customs and traditions of the Northeastern. This is possible because the cinema can be an agent of history, being able to make a historical and social reading through the fi lms and also can be made cinematographic readings of the history (Marc Ferro). Knowing that movies are cultural products that convey representations, cut and organize the social experience, tell stories, times, places, emotions, perspectives and worldviews, these real or fictional representations, memory or history, help to fi x social memory of the past, representations are always subjugated to certain perspectives and worldviews, we conclude that the films bring visions of sociocultural relations, there are always ideological discourses or collective perspectives related to this fi delity, and that there is no absolute truth (Robert Stam).

scholarly journals Carnival Anthropocene: Myth and Cultural Memory in Monique Roffey's Archipelago // Antropoceno Carnaval: El mito y memoria cultural en Archipelago de Monique Roffey

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-55
Author(s):  
C. Parker Krieg
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

      This essay examines the role of myth in and as cultural memory through a reading of the novel, Archipelago (2013), by the Trinidadian-British author Monique Roffey. Against conceptions of the Anthropocene as a break from the past—a break that repeats the myth of modernity—I argue that Roffey’s use of cultural memory offers a carnivalesque relation to the world in response to the narrative’s account of climate change trauma. Drawing on Bakhtin’s classic study of the carnival as an occasion for contestation and renewal, as well as Cheryl Lousely’s call for a “carnivalesque ecocriticism,” this essay expands on the recent ecocritical turn to the field of Memory Studies (Buell; Goodbody; Kennedy) to illustrate the way literature mediates between mythic and historical relations to the natural world. As literary expressions, the carnivalesque and the grotesque evoke myth and play in order to expose and transform the social myths which govern relations and administrate difference. Since literature acts as both a producer and reflector of cultural memory, this essay seeks to highlight the literary potential of myth for connecting past traumas to affirmational modes of political engagement. Resumen     Este ensayo examina el papel del mito en y como memoria cultural analizando la novela Archipelago (2013), escrita por la autora trinitense-británica Monique Roffey. Frente a la idea del Antropoceno como una ruptura con el pasado—una ruptura que repite el mito de la modernidad—este trabajo argumenta que el uso de la memoria cultural de Roffey ofrece una relación carnavalesca con el mundo en respuesta al trauma del cambio climático detallado en la novela. Basando mi argumento en la teoría clásica de Bakhtin sobre el carnaval como una ocasión para la contestación y la renovación, así como la llamada de Cheryl Lousely por una “ecocrítica carnavalesca,” este ensayo amplía el reciente giro de la ecocrítica hacia el campo de los estudios de memoria (Buell; Goodbody; Kennedy) para ilustrar cómo la literatura media entre las relaciones míticas e históricas con el mundo natural. Como expresiones literarias, lo carnavalesco y lo grotesco evocan el mito y el juego para revelar y transformar los mitos sociales que gobiernan las relaciones y gestionan la diferencia. Ya que la literatura actúa tanto como productora y como espejo de la memoria cultural, este ensayo busca destacar el potencial literario del mito para conectar traumas del pasado con modos de compromiso político más afirmativos.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITTLE POETS’ CORNER BETWEEN CULTURAL MEMORY AND GEOPOLITICS

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-370
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ascari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Compact ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Burial Rituals

As Jan Assmann writes, the concept of “cultural memory” both “draws our attention to the role of the past in constituting our world” and also investigates “the motives that prompt our recourse to it” (ix). Cultural memory is transmitted through a variety of mediators ranging from texts and images to commemorative sites, whose complex aesthetic and ideological configurations – whether associated with trauma or glory – are a source of great interest. In his New Science (1725–44), Giambattista Vico claimed that “humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando” (8), highlighting the importance burial rituals had in the creation of civilised society. The commemoration of the dead is indeed at the core of cultural memory as the foundation on which the social compact between the living and the dead rests.

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