Guests and Fellows
Visit of guest scientist Thiago Nicodemo, 10.07.-10.08.2023
During his stay, our cooperation partner Thiago Nicodemo, General Director of the State Archive of São Paulo and also Professor of Theory of History at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil), where he is responsible for the Center for Digital Humanities, spoke about the digitization of historical archives. He explained the difficulties encountered in preserving data from digital platforms, such as social networks and websites. The issues of successful data management, democratization of data, and access to sources are changing due to digitization and working with digital methods. For the digitization of historical sources in the archives of the State of São Paulo, one of the methods used is artificial intelligence for text recognition. The amount of data generated by digital data also affects archiving and access to data, which poses other challenges for the archive. Thiago Nicodemo assisted GUMELAB in the theoretical considerations of using digital methods in the e-research component to collect data from social networks such as Twitter and YouTube, among others.
Visit of fellows Heisman Arcila and Gicela Aguirre, 10.06.2023-10.07.2023
Heisman Arcila and Gicela Aguirre, two guest researchers from our cooperation team at the Universidad de Antioquia, are working closely with GUMELAB on e-research and the use of digital media. Gicela Aguirre García is working on her PhD at the Latin America Institute of the Free University of Berlin with digital methods related to the armed conflict in Colombia. Heisman Arcila's research focuses on digital methods, working with cognitive agents and training models, Big Data, Deep and Machine Learning. Both are part of the team led by Prof. Dr. Leonardo Pachón at the University of Antioquia (Medellín - Colombia) that researches on the access and automated analysis of data on social media such as Twitter and YouTube using trained models. GUMELAB's research project can gain insight into what topics people in Latin America, the U.S., and Germany discuss through the narratives dejpicted through comments and tweets generated while watching telenovelas and series. Together with qualitative interviews conducted during the field research visits, the data can be used to measure the influence of series and telenovelas on historical consciousness, memory images, and political education.
During their research stay, both fellows, together with the Brazilian guest researcher Alesson Rota and project collaborator Hannah Müssemann, wrote a handbook on employing digital methods in humanities projects. The publication of this handbook is scheduled for the end of 2023 and, based on the experience gained in the interdisciplinary team, will also open the methodology for future projects that aim at working with digital methods. Likewise, further internal workshops on the definition of artificial intelligence were held, as well as discussions on the opportunities and challenges of the e-research component in the research project with the GUMELAB team.
Visit of the guest scientist Tatjana Louis, 15.06.2022-15.07.2022
Prof. Dr. Tatjana Louis is Professor and Head of the Department of Languages and Culture of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá - Colombia). She conducts research on the development of historical consciousness, the creation of historical meaning, and the teaching and learning of history. During her month-long stay in Berlin, we conducted a series of internal workshops in which we evaluated the categorization of historical consciousness that we had previously used. Likewise, we developed new categories to measure the empirical work with memory images. The categorizations of the two theoretical components of our research are particularly important for the analysis of comments on social media as well as for the analysis of the interviews. For historical consciousness, in particular, we worked with the six concepts in the book "The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts" by Peter Seixas and Ton Morton (2013) and adapted them to our research questions. In the process of categorizing memory images, more theoretical and empirical challenges arose, which can only be solved through concrete examples. We also exchanged ideas about the programs of the seminars we developed within GUMELAB. By doing so, we want to increase university students' awareness of the topics and results of our research. This stimulates discussion on how history can be taught with telenovelas and series in the classroom.
Visit of the guest scientist Omar Rincón, 01.06.2022.-30.06.2021
Prof. Dr. Omar Rincón is professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá - Colombia). As an essayist and media critic, he regularly writes columns on television and media in the newspaper El Tiempo. Omar Rincón has long worked on television mediations, entertainment media, popular cultures, narcoculture, and political communication. He combines artistic approaches with scientific insights. During his stay in Berlin, we drew on his expertise on the works of communication theorist Jesús Martín-Barbero and discussed them regarding thematic issues of the GUMELAB project. Together we were able to watch individual chapters of the series Narcos and Dignity. In doing so, we talked about the different genres and cinematic characteristics of series and telenovelas and their impact on the audience. Omar Rincón emphasized repeatedly that research on entertainment media, as GUMELAB does, is relevant and how popular culture can be used for political communication strategies.
Image Credit: © César Sánchez Carreño, El Tiempo. Link: https://capsulas.com.co/win-no-hay-mas-omar-rincon-el-tiempo/
Visit of the guest scientist Carolina Galindo, 03.05.2022-03.06.2022
Prof. Dr. Carolina Galindo is professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá - Colombia). Her research interests include democracy, civic education, civil society, peace, security, violence, and state-society relations in Latin America. Her research stay in the GUMELAB project helped in the theoretical conceptualization of civic education. Together, different categories could be elaborated to work out the influence of series and telenovelas on the political education of the audience. Furthermore, Carolina Galindo presented her first research results on the Colombian productions "Hombres de Honor" and "La Niña". In doing so, we discussed the portrayal of the actors of the Colombian armed conflict in both Colombian and North American television series and telenovelas. The focus was on the transmission of political values and civic culture through these representations.
Visit of guest researcher Roberto Abdala Júnior, 15.11.-15.12.2021
Roberto Abdala Júnior is professor at the Faculty of History of the Universidad Federal de Goiás - UFG (Goiânia - Brasilien). He conducts research on audiovisual narratives, as well as on the construction of history and reality in film and television. One of his research topics is the incorporation of real historical images and archival materials into the fictional plot of the mini-series Anos Rebeldes. The research stay at GUMELAB focused on the production of Brazilian telenovelas and series such as Anos Rebeldes and O bem amado, which were analyzed by Roberto within the socio-political context of the country. The construction of memories and the effects on the political participation of society were central to the analysis. These shape, to no small extent, a part of the historical consciousness. Theories by Jörn Rüsen and Mikhail Bakhtin helped to categorize theoretically the reception of audiovisual formats by the audience. Roberto's visit succeeded in initiating discussions about audiovisual narratives in the Brazilian context, which differs from previous GUMELAB case studies from Chile and Colombia. Along with a joint analysis of individual sequences from Anos Rebeldes, the GUMELAB team, joined by Roberto and Colombian scholar Gicela Andrea Aguirre García, analyzed the first episode of Pablo Escobar-el Patrón del Mal from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. Thus, the group reflected on cultural peculiarities of the different productions. A joint visit to the Deutschen Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin helped to place film and television in the media landscape in terms of time and development.
Visit of guest researcher Lorena Antezana Barrios, 12.09.-12.10.2021
Lorena Antezana Barrios is a professor at the Instituto de Comunicación e Imagen de la Universidad de Chile. She researches the reception of audiovisual media, critical media consumption and media education. For example, she and her team are investigating, among other things, the reception of the Chilean telenovela Los 80 in different generations.
Her research stay at GUMELAB involved the conceptualisation of certain working terms such as memory images and "imaginarios" (similar to "imaginations" in English). Together with the GUMELAB team, she analysed different audio-visual and narrative strategies of how historical events are staged in entertainment media. For this, the contextualisation of the Chilean media landscape and memory processes was central. Thanks to her different experiences, she was able to explain different methods for the reception studies of telenovelas and series. During her stay, the characteristics and advantages of tandem partnerships between Master's students and doctoral candidates from the University of Chile and the Institute for Latin American Studies were also discussed. On the agenda was also the preparation of an international and interdisciplinary workshop at the Universidad de Chile and the travels of dialogue that will take place in Tocopilla and Santiago de Chile in March. These are part of GUMELAB's transfer activities to make science accessible to society.
Visit of the guest researcher Dr. Karen Genschow, 26.07.21 - 06.08.2021
Dr. Karen Genschow is a literature and cultural studies scholar with a regional focus on Latin America (with a thematic emphasis on cultural memory, trauma, gender) in literature, film, and popular cultural objects such as comics and series. She is an expert on Chilean series about the military dictatorship such as Mary y Mike, Ecos del desierto and Argentine telenovelas with a historical reference such as Montecristo. During her research stay at GUMELAB, several working meetings and internal workshops were held on decoding the genre and narrative elements of Latin American telenovelas and series.