Campus Medius: Digitales Kartografieren in den Kulturund Medienwissenschaften/Digital Mapping in Cultural and Media Studies by Simon Ganahl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Campus Medius: Digitales Kartografieren in den Kulturund Medienwissenschaften/Digital Mapping in Cultural and Media Studies by Simon Ganahl Christian Zolles Simon Ganahl, Campus Medius: Digitales Kartografieren in den Kulturund Medienwissenschaften/Digital Mapping in Cultural and Media Studies. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022. 360 pp. The last decade witnessed the rise of Digital Humanities, a transdisciplinary research practice that seeks to apply new digital tools, techniques, and modes of scholarship to classic fields of research in the humanities. Funded projects have increasingly aimed at generating large and processable databases (e.g., linguistic corpora) and at making available and improving online editions and annotations of books or archival documents. Researchers in the DH were confronted with the importance and difficulty of, on the one hand, tying their investigations in with the multi-medial web culture and, on the other hand, ensuring the long-term storage and accessibility of scans and encoded data. Their goal was to remain independent of temporary (software) fashions. This was the impetus to the foundation of scientific alliances, such as the Austrian "Kompetenznetzwerk Digitale Edition" (KONDE, www.digitale-edition.at), in order to strengthen the exchange between projects of similar digital interests. While the opportunity presented by this development to bring about some urgent structural changes in the academic landscape was, unfortunately, missed and many technical parameters are still open (such as a stable interconnectivity between back end [server] and the front end [web browser] or the data processibility between various projects), nevertheless the awareness of living in a digital age entered into the main academic discourses and, contrary to some doom-laden scenarios, there are indeed important research gains arising from the digital turn that should not be ignored. The digital mapping project Campus Medius, initiated, curated, and edited by Simon Ganahl, should perhaps be approached in this sense: that during these ten years, it remained on the periphery of DH's institutionalization process and tried independently to make the most of the new digital opportunities—and succeeded in doing so throughout. A key factor in the project's exemplary intersection of concept and technical implementation is its strong theoretical background, which avoids current gestures toward the somewhat neglectful abandonment of influential theoretical strands that has taken place in recent decades. In contrast, Ganahl tried to make some of these theories productive with the help of innovative hypertext and visual strategies. [End Page 144] Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of "chronotope," the Foucauldian-Deleuzian concept of "dispositif," and Bruno Latour's Actor-network theory are all used specifically to shape the way in which a rich selection of historical sources is presented in Campus Medius, according to the logic of information processing and with methods drawn from digital cartography. By pursuing "The database is the theory" (36) as a motto, the project demonstrates the importance of elementary information management work to properly trace the relational patterns of perceptions of space, time, and value. The book takes a time-space of twenty-four hours in Vienna in May 1933, marked by the "Turks Deliverance Celebration" organized by the Austrofascist regime in power as an "empirical laboratory." Campus Medius tried to catch and reflect the "medial atmosphere" and narrativity of this very "chronotope" by concentrating on fifteen selected events and following a multi-perspective narrative technique. One quickly recognizes that media experience is at the heart of the project (44–52), with "reading" being only one practice among others, following Ganahl's thesis that "having a media experience in modern society essentially means using reason in sovereign signs, capturing life in examining gazes, or speaking up in governed transmission" (28–29). In the topological sections of the project, it not only reflects upon the networks of sovereign signs, gazes, and voices, which were manifested in the 1933 mass events, but ultimately also offers a media-archaeological perspective on different strands of power and knowledge spanning from the seventeenth century up to the present day. In this way, well-known places such as the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace, the Burgtheater, or the Karl Marx-Hof, as well as media institutions like the national broadcasting company RAVAG, the cinema UFA Ton Kino, or the newspaper Neue Freie Presse are analyzed...