Digital Mediation of Art and Culture. A Database Approach.

  • This PhD thesis analyzes digital and data-based practices of mediation of art and culture, focusing on digital cultural repositories and databases as central mediation tools. It embeds the digital mediation practices discussed in this thesis in the media-theoretical and media-historic context of the transformation processes that have taken place in the digital media ecology, which have resulted in challenges for cultural institutions and museums, both in their role as institutions as well as in their daily mediation work. The thesis also situates digital mediation practices in the context of contemporary, analog practices of cultural learning, since the analog and digital realms can no longer be separated in the contemporary media ecology. One central topic of the analysis is mapping and understanding practices of mediation of art and culture and cultural learning in the digital realm. This is based on the database as a cultural form and repository that defines what can be said and known about a culture or society. The analysis introduces digital and data-based meaning-making processes within databases and database-interfaces themselves as well as cultural learning processes that reuse and contextualize the data in learning resources or by forming new experiences with them. The analysis concentrates mainly on web-based approaches and treats the process of co-creative knowledge generation as a central mode of the mediation of art and culture, using the paradigm of Software Studies developed by Lev Manovich as a lens for analysis. Moreover, the thesis examines what characteristics of contemporary digital media and the digital media ecology are reflected or play an important role in digital, data-based mediation practices. It raises the question as to whether the employment of digital data leads to a changed notion of what mediation of art and culture can accomplish and highlights central directions for museums to react to and take advantage of ongoing digitization.

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Meta data
Publishing Institution:IRC-Library, Information Resource Center der Jacobs University Bremen
Granting Institution:Jacobs Univ.
Author:Florian Wiencek
Referee:Adalbert Wilhelm, Victoria Szabo, Birgit Mersmann
Advisor:Marion G. Müller
Persistent Identifier (URN):urn:nbn:de:gbv:579-opus-1008454
Document Type:PhD Thesis
Language:English
Date of Successful Oral Defense:2018/05/06
Date of First Publication:2019/01/17
Academic Department:Social Sciences & Humanities
PhD Degree:Visual Studies
Focus Area:Diversity
Other Countries Involved:United States of America
Call No:2018/27

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