Startseite Hotspots for textual dynamics: cultural semiotic approach to digital archives
Artikel
Lizenziert
Nicht lizenziert Erfordert eine Authentifizierung

Hotspots for textual dynamics: cultural semiotic approach to digital archives

  • Maarja Ojamaa EMAIL logo und Indrek Ibrus
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 22. Oktober 2021

Abstract

Digital cultural archives and databases are promising an era of heritage democratization and an enhancement of the role of arts in everyday cultures. It is hoped that mass digitization initiatives in many corners of the world can facilitate the secure preservation of human cultural heritage, with easy access and diverse ways for creative reuse. Understanding the dialogic processes within these increasingly vast databases necessitates a dynamic conceptualization of data they contain. The paper argues that this can be found in Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotic notion of text and text’s functions in culture. It elaborates on the three key characteristics of text – expression, boundary, and structure – as manifested within the digital semiosphere. At the same time, the textual dialogues within digital archives are increasingly conditioned by metadata, which is hereby conceptualized as metalanguage inducing a modeling effect on archived texts and defining their possible sphere of dynamics. To balance the explanations of creative operations of digital archives, the paper also demonstrates their auto-communicative mechanisms for facilitating cultural continuities and stability.


Corresponding author: Maarja Ojamaa, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, E-mail:

Funding source: Estonian Research Council

Award Identifier / Grant number: PSG675

Award Identifier / Grant number: PRG1191

  1. Research funding: The study was supported by Estonian Research Council (PSG675; PRG1191).

References

Andersen, Jack. 2018. Archiving, ordering, and searching: Search engines, algorithms, databases, and deep mediatization. Media, Culture & Society 40(8). 1135–1150. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718754652.Suche in Google Scholar

Baetens, Jan & Jan Van Looy. 2007. Digitising cultural heritage: The role of interpretation in cultural preservation. Image & Narrative 7(4). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/digital_archive/baetens_vanlooy.htm (accessed 24 November 2018).Suche in Google Scholar

Baron, Jaimie. 2014. The archive effect: Found footage and the audiovisual experience of history. Oxon: Routledge.10.4324/9780203066935Suche in Google Scholar

Benjamin, Walter. 2008 [1936]. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. London: Penguin.10.4135/9781446269534.n3Suche in Google Scholar

Chun, Wendy H. K. 2008. The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory. Critical Inquiry 35(1). 148–171. https://doi.org/10.1086/595632.Suche in Google Scholar

Corballis, Michael C. & Isabelle S. Häberling. 2017. The many sides of hemispheric asymmetry: A selective review and outlook. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 23(9/10). 710–718. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617717000376.Suche in Google Scholar

Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Mal d’Archive: Une impression Freudienne. Paris: Éditions Galilée.Suche in Google Scholar

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2004. The archive as metaphor: From archival space to archival time. Open 7. 46–53.Suche in Google Scholar

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. Digital memory and the archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Featherstone, Mike. 2006. Archive. Theory, Culture & Society 23. 591–596. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406023002106.Suche in Google Scholar

Flinn, Andrew. 2010. An attack on professionalism and scholarship?: Democratising archives and the production of knowledge. Ariadne 62. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/flinn/ (accessed 21 November 2018).Suche in Google Scholar

Fossati, Giovanna. 2009. From grain to pixel: The archival life of film in transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.10.5117/9789089641397Suche in Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.Suche in Google Scholar

Gligorov, Riste, Lotte B. Balthussen, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lora Aroyo, Maarten Brinkerink, Johan Oomen & Annelies van Ees. 2010. Towards integration of end-user tags with professional annotations. In Proceedings of Web Science Conference 2010, April 26–27. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.188.3495&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed 21 November 2018).Suche in Google Scholar

Hartley, John. 2012. Digital futures for cultural and media studies. Chichester: John Wiley.10.4324/9780203814284Suche in Google Scholar

Hartley, John, Ibrus Indrek & Maarja Ojamaa. 2020. On the digital semiosphere: Culture, media, and science for the anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury.10.5040/9781501369209Suche in Google Scholar

Holtorf, Cornelius & Graham Fairclough. 2013. The new heritage and re-shapings of the past. In Alfredo González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming archaeology: Beyond the tropes of modernity, 197–210. Oxon: Routledge.10.4324/9780203068632.ch15Suche in Google Scholar

Ibrus, Indrek & Maarja Ojamaa. 2018. Newsreels vs. newspapers vs. metadata: Comparative study of how metadata schemas model the 1930s in Estonia. VIEW 7(14). 123–137. https://doi.org/10.18146/2213-0969.2018.jethc157.Suche in Google Scholar

Ibrus, Indrek & Maarja Ojamaa. 2020. The creativity of digital (audiovisual) archives: A dialogue between media archaeology and cultural semiotics. Theory, Culture & Society 37(3). 49–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419871646.Suche in Google Scholar

Jegorov, Boris, Mihhail Ignatjev & Juri Lotman. 1995. Iskusstvennyĭ intellekt kak metamekhanizm kulʹtury [Artistic intellect as a meta-mechanism of culture]. Ezhekvartalʹnik russkoĭ filologii i kulʹtury [Quarterly of Russian Philology and Culture] 4. 277–287.Suche in Google Scholar

Laermans, Rudi & Pascal Gielen. 2007. The archive of the digital an-archive. Image & Narrative 7(4). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/digital_archive/laermans_gielen.htm (accessed 24 November 2018).Suche in Google Scholar

Legg, Catherine. 2013. Peirce, meaning, and the semantic web. Semiotica 193(1/4). 119–143. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2013-0007.Suche in Google Scholar

Lepik, Peet. 2007. Universaalidest Juri Lotmani semiootika kontekstis. Tartu: Tartu University Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 1977a [1970]. The structure of the artistic text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 1977b [1974]. The dynamic model of a semiotic system. Semiotica 21(3/4). 193–210. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1977.21.3-4.193.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 1978. Fenomen kul’tury [The phenomenon of culture]. Sign Systems Studies 10. 3–17.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 1981a. Semiotika kul’tury i poni͡atie teksta [Semiotics of culture and the notion of the text]. Sign Systems Studies 12. 3–7.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 1981b. Tekst v tekste [The text within the text]. Sign Systems Studies 14. 3–18.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 1994 [1981]. The text within the text. PMLA 109(3). 377–384. https://doi.org/10.2307/463074.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 2001 [1990]. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London: I. B. Tauris.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 2005 [1984]. On the semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 33(1). 205–229. https://doi.org/10.12697/sss.2005.33.1.09.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 2009 [1992]. Culture and explosion. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110218473Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 2011 [1967]. The place of art among other modeling systems. Sign Systems Studies 39(2/4). 249–270. https://doi.org/10.12697/sss.2011.39.2-4.10.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri, Boris Uspenskij, Pjatigorskij Aleksandr, Vyacheslav Ivanov & Vladimir Toporov. 2013 [1973]. Theses on the semiotic study of cultures (as applied to Slavic texts). In Silvi Salupere (ed.), Beginnings of the semiotics of culture, 51–77. Tartu: University of Tartu Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Lotman, Juri. 2019 [1985]. Memory in a culturological perspective. In Marek Tamm (ed.), Culture, memory, and history: Essays in cultural semiotics, 133–137. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_9Suche in Google Scholar

Lüders, Marika. 2019. Pushing music: People’s continued will to archive versus Spotify’s will to make them explore. European Journal of Cultural Studies 24(4). 952–969. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549419862943.Suche in Google Scholar

Manovich, Lev. 2001. The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Suche in Google Scholar

McAfee, Andrew & Erik Brynjolfsson. 2017. Machine, platform, crowd: Harnessing our digital future. New York: W. W. Norton.Suche in Google Scholar

Monticelli, Daniele. 2012. Self-description, dialogue, and periphery in Juri Lotman’s later thought: Some elements for a comparison with contemporary political thinking. In Susi K. Frank, Cornelia Ruhe & Alexander Schmitz (eds.), Explosion und peripherie: Jurij Lotmans semiotik der kulturellen dynamik revisited, 57–77. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.10.1515/transcript.9783839417850.57Suche in Google Scholar

Noordegraaf, Julia. 2011. Remembering the past in the Dynarchive: The state of knowledge in digital archives. Paper presented at Media in Transition 7. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/mit7/papers/Noordegraaf.pdf (accessed 22 September 2021).Suche in Google Scholar

Oomen, Johan, Belice B. Lotte, Limonard Sander & Maarten Brinkerink. 2010. Emerging practices in the cultural heritage domain: Social tagging of audiovisual heritage. Paper presented at Proceedings of the WebSci10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228585569_Emerging_Practices_in_the_Cultural_Heritage_Domain-Social_Tagging_of_Audiovisual_Heritage (accessed 21 November 2018).Suche in Google Scholar

Pomerantz, Jeffrey. 2015. Metadata. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/10237.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar

Stockinger, Peter. 2015. The semiotic turn in digital archives and libraries. Les Cahiers du Numérique 2015(1). 57–82. https://doi.org/10.3166/lcn.11.1.57-82.Suche in Google Scholar

Stockinger, Peter. 2017. Semiotics of textscapes and cultures. Semiotica 219(1/4). 543–561. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2017-0083.Suche in Google Scholar

Strauven, Wanda. 2011. The observer’s dilemma: To touch or not to touch. In Huhtamo Erkki & Parikka Jussi (eds.), Media archaeology: Approaches, applications, and implications, 148–163. Berkeley: University of California Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Torlasco, Domietta. 2011. Digital impressions: Writing memory after Agnès Varda. Discourse 33(1). 390–408.10.1353/dis.2011.a484316Suche in Google Scholar

Torop, Peeter. 2003. Semiospherical understanding: Textuality. Sign Systems Studies 31(2). 323–339. https://doi.org/10.12697/sss.2003.31.2.01.Suche in Google Scholar

Torop, Peeter. 2012. Semiotics of mediation: Theses. Sign Systems Studies 40(3). 286–295. https://doi.org/10.12697/sss.2012.3-4.15.Suche in Google Scholar

Trant, Jennifer. 2009. Studying social tagging and folksonomy: A review and framework. Journal of Digital Information 10(1). 1–44.Suche in Google Scholar

Uricchio, William. 2009. Moving beyond the artefact: Lessons from participatory culture. In Marianne van den Boomen, Lammes Sybille & Ann-Sophie Lehmann (eds.), Digital material: Tracing new media in everyday life and technology, 131–141. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Received: 2019-01-03
Accepted: 2021-06-17
Published Online: 2021-10-22
Published in Print: 2021-11-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 21.9.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2019-0001/html?lang=de
Button zum nach oben scrollen