Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how tourists' use of social media asks for new strategies to capture the materiality of the wild (in Banff National Park) and hence creates new ways of engaging with it.

Paper long abstract:

Banff National Park is a large playground for tourists. Indeed, the immense wilderness and the mountains that compose it have been immortalized in various material forms, such as paintings, postcards and advertisements, over the last 130 years. Nowadays, by means of digital photography and smartphones, tourists have the opportunity to capture and share intangible, immaterial memories instantly with their loved ones or the rest of the world.

During my field visit in spring 2018, I observed a whole series of tactics tourists apply in order to immortalize these material spaces considered as "wilderness". After extensive investigation of tourists narratives on - as well as the observation of their photographic performances, I found that those had not emerged by chance. Much rather those practices seem to follow certain imaginaries, narratives and ideas of aesthetics constructed and perpetuated in various kinds of media. One major channel of photography diffusion today is Instagram, which thus plays a major role in producing touristic aesthetics, and constructing imaginaries of the wild.

In this paper I explore how tourists' use of social media (in this case Instagram) asks for new strategies to capture the materiality of the wild and hence creates new ways of engaging with it. Furthermore I show how representations of the engagement with nature and large spaces like mountains and lakes are produced in a very particular way in order to be shared with the rest of the world, fitting the imaginary produced by social media and reproducing it at the same time.

Paper short abstract:

Instagram is a platform for stories. In fact, many of its users identify as 'visual storytellers'. This paper presents explorations of this platform as a site to conduct qualitative research through a study of narratives of care for old buildings in Sweden marked with the hashtag #byggnadsvård.

Paper long abstract:

Byggnadsvård means care for buildings in Swedish, or conservation of the built environment. It is a concept that has a growing presence on social media expressing a concern for the past but also for the future. Here the past and the longing to preserve traditional skills and prolong the life of old material is even thought of as environmental activism promoting better uses of resources and rejecting the dominant cultural narrative of modernity that "new is always better".

The climate impact of the building sector is severe. In Sweden it generates around one third of all waste and is responsible for about 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The house relates closely to the critical environmental issues humanity now faces and in it one can detect several 'regimes of care' materialising; care for the individual, the family, the community, society and the planet we call our home. This is apparent in the online narratives of old houses.

Instagram is presented as a visual storytelling device intended to foster and "bring out creativity in all of us". Though highly commercialised this can be a platform that gives voice to alternative understandings and other concerns, and in this case reveal the mediations and transformations of tradition and continuity, and different kinds of handling "pastness" and histories worth continuing. Along with analysing the narratives tagged #byggnadsvård the paper presents an experiment with methods and an attempt at finding ways for contextualising practices that cross boundaries of cyberspace and physical space.

Paper short abstract:

The names of regions are often used as hashtags in online social networks. This research applies a content analysis of User Generated Content on Instagram to capture the contexts in which the names of historical regions of North of Portugal are being used in the informal online narratives.

Paper long abstract:

A name is a relevant element of a specific identity of a territory, and it is also an important symbol for representing a space as a unit. In the case of the North of Portugal region(NPR), the names of its sub-regional units have changed in the last decades due to the evolution of the administrative map of Portugal. In the NPR there are three main historical regions -Minho, Douro Litoral and Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro- corresponding to the former provinces of Portugal, which, nowadays, do not have any administrative function. The NPR is currently divided in eight administrative sub-regions, corresponding to intermunicipal communities, with names derived from the nearby rivers. However, the names of these three old provinces are still used in different formal contexts, such as planning documents, names of institutions and by touristic authorities to promote sub-regional destination brands.

This exploratory research aims to understand the contexts in which the three historical regions' names of the NPR are being reproduced, and what are their new meanings in the informal online narratives. For this purpose, the User Generated Content(UGC) on Instragram - one of the most important UGC platforms - is analysed. To do so, a sample of publications is collected in which these names are used as "hashtags" (words starting with a "#" symbol), and a content analysis of the associated post titles is done. A classification is applied to understand in which geographical and social contexts these names are being used, and to what characteristics they are associated.

Paper short abstract:

A través del estudio de dos casos concretos, "Fillos de San Marcos" y "Carballo na memoria", rastrearemos los procesos participativos colaborativos de construcción de la memoria de una población basados en compartir fotografías históricas de la vida de ésta a través de internet y las redes sociales.

Paper long abstract:

Dentro del marco del proyecto interuniversitario Sharing Society (Ref. CSO2016-78107-R) sobre Acción participativa colaborativa más amplio, se han seleccionado dos casos concretos "Fillos de San Marcos" y "Carballo na memoria", para aproximarnos a la construcción de la memoria colectiva en dos localidades de A Coruña: Corcubión y Carballo. El objetivo es ver cómo a través del volcado de fotografías históricas en las redes sociales por parte de los vecinos de esas poblaciones se mapea un pasado desaparecido, se crean rutas comunes pero diferenciadas para el conocimiento del Nosotros y se extiende el impacto de esta dinámica en la construcción de la memoria de un pueblo. Se trata de analizar cómo estos casos intentan (re)crear el pasado y (re)formular la identidad común a través de procesos de participación (ya sean de abajo a arriba o de arriba a abajo) basados en la imagen fotográfica, en la instantánea como recuerdo, sirviendo las nuevas tecnologías de facilitadoras y posibilitadoras. Se investiga no solo el proceso, sino el impacto que tienen estos proyectos en la vida de las localidades, en su autopercepción y en su proyección y se rastrea cómo son herederos de una tradición anterior modificada por el tiempo y cómo colaboran en el fomento de procesos participativos en otros ámbitos.

Paper short abstract:

This paper revisits the concept of curation after digitalisation has enabled it to relocate from the craft of museum people to a learning strategy for students in a history class.

Paper long abstract:

In my ongoing research I re-visit the concept of curation as a practice that transcends from behind the scenes in museums into the everyday lives of students. For this, I depart from a very familiar activity to school teachers and students: the museum visit. After visiting a museum, students unfolded bits of historical phenomena by presenting a few artefacts and artworks found online. This case study is drawn from my ongoing dissertation research undertaken in upper-secondary schools in Finland. In the students' short assignments, I found commonalities with the craft of museum curators: keepers of the artefacts in an institution's collection who assume the responsibility to construct an exhibition around a few of them.

Curation is a concept that has been borrowed as a metaphor to describe how young people construct narratives and identities online. Distanced from its original meaning, two aspects make curation more helpful in the context of the youth and digital literacies: the internet as a space of inquiry, and the 'self' as subject of exhibitions. However, other aspects of museum curation also resonate with the tasks that students engage with in class: the importance of recognising the context of the digital artefact and a shared sense of authorship of exhibitions. In my presentation I will examine closer these aspects and show how digitalisation enables to relocate practices traditionally anchored in memory institutions.

Paper short abstract:

The proposal advances a survey on sentiment analysis, that has recently incorporated audio and video in its collection and classification of information. Thus, this methodology is used to identify sentiments in User-Generated Videos on the Camino.

Paper long abstract:

The paper recovers the importance of emotions in humanities, applying them to the exploration of sources available on the Web. On the one hand, the 'affective' and 'emotional' turn in humanities and social sciences highlights the importance of relational qualities. On the other hand, cinematic productions are cultural narratives, whose experiences can be compared to the travel ones. In addition, motion and emotion dialogue in spatiovisual disciplines. Assuming that videos are spaces of intimacy, the proposal advances a survey on Sentiment Analysis. Although this branch of affective computing research has been traditionally associated to texts, it has recently incorporated audio and video sources for the collection and classification of information. This methodology is used to identify sentiments in user-generated videos on the Camino de Santiago. Results point out cultural and sentimental narratives produced on the Web under the form of videos.

Paper short abstract:

My presentation explores the question of territorialization in the case of the Chinese-Malaysian-American author Shirley Geok-lin Lim and the manners in which self-representation and the mapping of one’s territory are being performed in online spaces.

Paper long abstract:

For those familiar with the work of the Chinese-Malaysian-American author Shirley Geok-lin Lim, the exploration of herself as deterritorialized has been at the heart of her nonfictional writing. Looking backwards to her memoir Among the White Moon Faces (1996), whose final paragraph conveys the promise that the “absence of place, [her]self absent where [she] live[s]” have come to an end with Lim’s move to the West Coast, my presentation seeks to study the different manners in which contemporary identity and the narrative anchoring and mapping out of a territory for the self are being represented and performed in an online environment. By examining Lim’s Facebook posts and conversations, I will limn her self-writing as it expands from traditional forms to encompass more innovative multimedial online experiments. I will focus on the material affordances and constraints through which self-mapping is expressed and demonstrate that it is indeed as a posting, networked and tagged self, claiming virtual space for herself and for her readers/“friends,” thriving in hybrid linguistic and cultural practices and spaces that Lim has reached viable accommodations and expressions of self. Finally, what this most strikingly conveys is how virtual deterritorialization is signified as empowering for somebody who has always fought labels and categories, complicating notions of belonging, community or affiliation.