Imported from Grants Tool 4648356

From video surveillance to online teaching, from drone warfare, highway management to telemedicine: closed-circuit images take up multiple spaces today. Despite being quotidian, their history remains largely unknown. Operative TV's goal is to fill this gap by providing the first ever study of audiovisual closed-circuits in the longue durée. It scrutinizes the closed-circuits' diversity between the 1930s and the 1990s and develops case studies from the USA, France, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland - countries crucial for the development of closed-circuits and providing access to resources for writing the history of a medium whose images were conceived as instruments rather than representations.Distributed under Industrial Television and CCTV (for closed-circuit television), the systems were developed in Europe and the USA mainly by enterprises active in televisual R&D (i.e., RCA, Grundig, and many more). In their most basic organization, they connected a camera with a monitor by cable; more sophisticated designs allowed for the video recording of content or bi-directional conversation. While CCTV today stands as a synonym of the surveillance camera, its historical applications were at least as heterogeneous as contemporary closed-circuits and used on factory floors and in nuclear plants, in hospitals and schools. In this study, subproject (SP) 2 focuses on surveillance operations. However, Operative TV also emphasizes televisual practices beyond the surveillance framework and the closed-circuit's embeddedness in multiple institutional spaces. In lieu of using a narrow definition of what I call audiovisual closed-circuits (AVCC), I comprehend AVCC as a flexible and pluriform system: its applicability beyond the surveillance camera paradoxically stems from its closed design. Drawing upon multinational archival research, Operative TV examines two main hypotheses. First, it posits that the analysis of television in industrial, educational, and military contexts cannot be based on habitual analytical categories such as texts or spectators. Instead, AVCC necessitates a methodological shift towards an understanding of audiovisual production as a chain of operations that allows analyzing the entanglement of human and non-human actors. AVCC's usefulness indeed was contingent on the interplay of heterogeneous elements including operators, screens, infrastructures, and images: their interdependence, rather than the isolated components, should form the core of a historical enquiry. Second, Operative TV argues that the history of AVCC, an analog-electronic technology, nourishes a media archaeology of the digital. AVCC emerged at the same moment as digital computers; it coexisted and sometimes converged with digital machines. Before the computer definitively took over factory and office floors, television was used as a tool for operations ranging from targeting to instructing: analyzing AVCC's alleged "universality" (Journal d'Yverdon 1955) allows to better understand the emergence of our digital society. To discuss these two hypotheses, the project introduces an original framework drawing upon recent media theory, and looks more specifically at four operations performed by AVCC (SP 1 to 4). In addition to the operation of surveilling (SP 2), targeting (SP 1) was a central - and first - function of closed-circuits from the 1930s on; automating the workplace and instructing students (SP 3 & 4) were other tasks performed by AVCC in the postwar years. Sustained by complex human-machines ecologies, these operations would rapidly be executed by digital computers: before their digitization, they were the realm of analog TV.

DigitalesSchauDepot schafft eine Infrastruktur, mit der Sammlungsbestände digitalisiert und sichtbar gemacht sowie im Digitalen in ihren kulturellen Bedeutungen gesichert werden. Damit leistet das Projekt einen Beitrag an die Entwicklung einer nachhaltigen Strategie für Museen, Sammlungen und Gedächtnisinstitutionen und stärkt deren Position in der digitalen Zukunft.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Swiss archives and collections have been steadily digitalizing their materials, for "anything that is not digitally accessible usually gets ignored" ("Netzwerk Schweizer Pressefotografie" exhibition). While analog archives are primarily concerned with the long-term preservation of the material, digital archives mostly serve communication with the public. But the promise of unlimited accessibility and participation is misleading. Online accessibility does not in itself guarantee broad public engagement, and it has not been taking advantage of the potential of the digital domain. Even if the concept of participation has been increasingly discussed in recent years, the public, especially in the German-speaking world, has hardly been involved in the process of indexing and valorization of images at all. The common goal of this project is to design a visual interface with machine learning-based tools to make it easy to annotate, contextualize, organize, and link both images and their meta-information, to deliberately encourage the participatory use of archives. In a series of workshops and interviews with both academic and non-academic users, along with archivists and database specialists, the project will analyze the new demands of digital (and process-oriented) knowledge production in order to achieve these goals. In their own rubric - Citizen Archive - academic and non-academic users of the existing Swiss Society for Folklore Studies SSFS's (Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde SGV) networks and partners will receive a series of Calls for Images inviting them to upload and comment current photographs as comments on historical images; this will further foster the contextualization of the archival material. In turn, these digital additions will have to be supplied with metadata and contextual knowledge. Such analysis of the context of images and collections (crowdsourcing) will enrich the metadata of the material and thus also make image searching and information retrieval more effective. Along with the design of the participatory digital image archive, this four-year research project will describe the transformation of analog archives into digital archives from the perspective of technology, communication, and the anthropology of knowledge. The common goal is the analysis and systematic description of historical and contemporary archiving practices: the generation, organization, storage, and communication of knowledge. The complex interplay of participants, epistemological orders, and the genesis and graphical representation of information and knowledge in such practices will be studied in connection with three collections from the photo archive of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies. In previous research, these areas were mostly considered separately rather than from an interdisciplinary, cross-domain and application-oriented perspective that can capture such interplay. In contrast, the proposed project's interdisciplinary collaboration between digital humanities, cultural anthropology, and design research will serve our goal of increasing, improving, and imparting knowledge of analog and especially digital image archives and of ways to use them. This photo archive is an important part of the cultural memory of Switzerland; it contains approachable images organized according to such themes as tradition, identity, lifestyles, and everyday life. A broad public interest in these materials can be expected. The research project would like to preserve-also with the help of machine learning-what is most endangered: the personal reports of those contemporary witnesses who lived through the historical periods represented by the SSFS/SGV photo archive. All the project's planned technological developments, including the machine learning component, will be based on the premise of scalability; that is, the methods and the technology must be transferable to the holdings of other collections of the Digital Humanities. As its common primary outputs, the project will produce not only the visual interface discussed above, a dynamic storage infrastructure, but also a handbook with guidelines for the future development of participatory archives as well as six dissertations and several scientific papers in the various disciplines.

Das Projekt untersucht Kontinuitäten, Unterbrüche und Neubesetzungen im semantischen Feld und in der Bildimagination rund um die Denkfigur des männlichen Gottes im neopaganen Hexentum. Ausgehend von den Vernetzungen zwischen der Religionsforschung und esoterischen, religionsproduktiven Strömungen im ausgehenden 19. Jh. und zu Beginn des 20. Jh., welche den Hintergrund für die Gründung des Wicca als moderne Hexenreligion durch Gerald Gardner beginnend 1946 darstellen, sollen grundlegende Elemente des männlichen Gottes festgehalten werden. Anhand dieses Idealtypes können die weiteren Entwicklungen dieses Gottes nachgezeichnet und eingeordnet werden. Sowohl Kontinuität wie auch Innovation in der Figur bedienen sich der Legitimationsstrategie des Rückverweises und der Genealogie. Selbst die Ablehnung von Motiven oder Gedanken, welche Gardner festsetzte, werden in Verweis auf ihn diskutiert und abgelehnt. Neu gebildete Assoziationslinien werden genealogisch verankert und werden so Teil einer ständig dynamisch bleibenden Idee von Religionsgeschichte und Religion an sich. In einem ersten Teil wird dem genannten Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Religion im Vorfeld der Gründung des Wicca nachgegangen. Diese Verstrickungen werden auch exemplarisch an ausgewählten Figuren in den Bruchstellen zwischen Esoterik, Druidentum und Wicca, Folkloreforschung, Altertumswissenschaften sowie Literatur und Religionsproduktion aufgezeigt. Trotz der heterogenen Gemengelage sind die Ideen und Motive, welche das breite Feld des 'Hexen-Gottes' ausmachen bereits lesbar. An drei emischen Texten zur paganen Gottesfigur, seiner Geschichte, Bedeutung und Verehrung sollen verschiedene Fragen untersucht werden: Die Frage nach einer direkten Kontinuität im Sinne der unveränderten Weiterführung von Motiven; die Frage nach der Kontinuität der darunterliegenden Rechtfertigung von Motiven; zuletzt muss auch nach der Assoziationslogik oder Rechtfertigung neuer Motive oder Interpretationen zum Gott gefragt werden. Dieser dritte Teil widmet sich den Texten "Masks of Misrule. The Horned God and his Cult in Europe" (1996) von Nigel Jackson, "Dionysos. Exciter to Frenzy" (2013) von der Priesterin und Autorin Vikki Bramshaw und aus dem Jahr 2021 "The Horned God oft he Witches" von Jason Mankey. Zur kohärenten Diskussion der Entwicklung einer Gottesfigur mit damit in Verbindung stehenden Objekten, Eigenschaften, Narrativen, Körperlichkeiten und Landschaften muss ein erweiterter Figurenbegriff mit Einbezug von Text und Bild als Instrument dienen. Dazu wird Auerbachs Begriff der Figura und Figuration hin zu Dispositiv und schliesslich Denkfigur weitergeführt. In diesem Sinne wird die Denkfigur als genauso relevant und anwendbar in der Bildwissenschaft wie in der Literaturwissenschaft postuliert.

Die anfangs 2010 gegründete Forschungsstelle Recht und Religion (FSRR) bezweckt die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit den zwischen Recht und Religion bestehenden Bezugsfeldern. Sie versteht sich als interdisziplinäre Plattform, in der sich in erster Linie Rechts- und Religionswissenschaft begegnen, die aber auch weitere wissenschaftliche Disziplinen wie etwa die Soziologie, Ethnologie, Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaft einbezieht. Dabei werden nicht nur theoretische Fragestellungen behandelt. Mit ihrer Arbeit möchte die Forschungsstelle vielmehr auch Beiträge zur Bewältigung praktischer Problemstellungen leisten. Aktuell zwingt spätestens die Annahme der Volksinitiative für ein Minarettbauverbot im November 2009 zur umfassenden Reflexion über das Verhältnis von Recht und Religion. Die Forschungsstelle wurde im Jahr 2020 als offizielles Forschungsnetzwerk der Universität Basel anerkannt.