Campus Medius: Digital Mapping in Cultural and Media Studies

1. Why did you choose this topic?

Essentially for three reasons: Firstly because I wanted to understand what had happened on this condensed weekend in Vienna on May 13 and 14, 1933; secondly in order to analyze mediality as a modern field of experience using this example; and thirdly because I aim to show what digital humanities informed by cultural and media studies can achieve.

2. What new perspectives does your book offer?

It combines concepts from media studies with methods of digital cartography and hence leads to mutual enlightenment: on the one hand awareness is raised of the ideologies of cartographic techniques, and on the other the cultural studies ideal of multi-perspectivity is concretely applied in the form of a mapping project.

3. What makes your topic relevant for current research debates?

Contrary to the trend, Campus Medius does not follow a big data approach but works with small data, which are dis- and reassembled from the perspectives of cultural and media studies, as well as informatics and design. It is not a quantitative but a qualitative digital humanities project, which was carried out as a long-standing multidisciplinary collaboration and attempts to connect traditional with digital publication models.

4. Choose one person you would like to discuss your book with!

I have had the good fortune to be in dialogue with distinguished scholars working internationally in the book's research fields for years. Apart from that, it would be interesting to discuss the historical case study with the Austrian politician Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (1899-1956), the initiator of the Austrofascist ›Turks Deliverance Celebration‹ (Türkenbefreiungsfeier) in Vienna on May 14, 1933, which Campus Medius examines from multiple perspectives.

5. Your book summary in one sentence:

A cartographic survey of the campus medius, the field of media, starting from twenty-four hours in Vienna in May 1933.