These past few weeks, I’ve been working on the Great Utopians project. It’s a relatively short database – 60 entries – that has received contributions from multiple researchers, compiling a list of thinkers and practitioners who, by their efforts for the radical improvement of society, have been designated as utopians. I’ve analyzed specific biographical data related to them – gender, nationality, place of birth, etc.

There is something very apparent when looking at the map: it’s astoundingly European – 48.3% of all entries, to be precise. That’s 29 Europeans out of 60 utopians. For comparison, there are four Africans. Four utopians, in a continent with 1.2 billion inhabitants.

Oh, that just means utopian thought is not a relevant field in Africa.

That doesn’t sound right. Do African thinkers not believe the world can be improved? I believe the problem is with us – we, in academia, who define ‘valid thought’.

Edward Said argued that, because the Enlightenment – a phenomenon occurring when Europe quite literally ruled the world – laid the foundations for the creation of the social sciences, an idea of Europeans as arbiters of logic is deeply ingrained in our minds. In essence, ‘knowledge producers’ work within borders defined by colonial Europe.

As researchers, we are inheritors of the Enlightenment, so it stands to reason that we would unconsciously inherit this philosophy that sees Europe as the civilizational model of the world. Allow me to be unoriginal and mutilate James Carville’s iconic phrase:

It’s Eurocentrism, stupid.

But why does Europe define ‘worthwhile thought’ for all peoples, and how do we fix this issue? For this, I suggest we look to historian Enrique Dussel’s essay ‘Europa, Modernidad y Eurocentrismo’.

To start, Dussel argues that European identity defines the continent as inheriting a perceived civilizational continuum beginning with Classical Greece, going through Rome, Byzantium, and Medieval Christendom, and ending at the Renaissance. All these civilizations fundamentally ‘otherized’ neighboring cultures – Thracians, Celts, Muslims, etc. Modern Europe then applied this logic to people worldwide during its colonial expansion.

The maturation of Eurocentrism then came from Modernity being defined as the product of four European events – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. This has made it so Modernity is seen as an equation of exclusively intra-European phenomena.

All these events made Europe the nucleus of Modernity and the expanding force that ‘modernizes’ the periphery. Thus, Dussel characterizes Modernity in the following terms:

1. Modern society sees itself as more developed (and Modern society = Europe);
2. Developmental superiority demands that ‘primitives’ be developed by their ‘superiors’:
3. The path towards development should emulate the one taken by Europe.

It seems we should attempt to fix this issue to create a fairer philosophy of history – if not to try to make the world fairer.

Dussel argues we must recognize the European civilizational continuum as a myth – based upon ideas of European cultural exceptionalism – and our understanding of Modernity as incomplete when we define it exclusively by European phenomena. It then becomes apparent that it’s wrong to equate ‘European civilization’ with an ideal matrix that should be forced upon the world. Modernity cannot be actualized by imposing “Europeanness”, but by transcending Eurocentrism and recognizing that the Modern world is built by all peoples. This, Dussel says, is a recognition of the dignity of the Other.

The Digital Lab is built upon the field of Digital Humanities, which distinguishes itself from traditional academia by its special focus on pluralism and diversity. A Eurocentric philosophy of creating thought will deafen us to the contributions of valuable voices worldwide, not just the ones that adhere to ‘correct’ ways of thinking. How can we create a pluralistic and diverse field of research if we don’t allow ourselves to cut the umbilical cord connecting us to Mother Europe, the entity that swallowed the world, spat it out, and told it how to think?

Dussel’s maxim should guide us: recognizing the dignity of the Other; to those who study utopia, this means recognizing the validity of those civilizational matrices in the “periphery” of the world and, by extension, the unique utopian structures such realities may generate.

You can read Enrique Dussel’s essay here. It’s in Spanish, so good luck with that.

As technology continues to evolve, so does the study of color theory in cinema, with each decade witnessing advancements. Concurrently, the realm of digital humanities introduces new methods and tools for analyzing colors in films. Amid my exploration of technical progress in this domain, I encountered Barbara Flueckiger and Gaudenz Halter’s article, “Methods and Advanced Tools for the Analysis of Film Colors in Digital Humanities.” This research utilized digital tools to explore the stylistic, expressive, and narrative dimensions of color in film, bridging traditional approaches with contemporary visualization methods.

The study’s primary aim was to examine relationships between aesthetics and technology of film colors. It revealed the complexities inherent in employing a computer-assisted approach, which necessitated temporal segmentation and a structured vocabulary of theoretical and analytical concepts, particularly when studying films spanning different eras from 1895 to 1995.

 

What struck me as intriguing was the study’s adoption of a “technobole approach”, which focused on contextualizing technical advancements within cultural, social, and economic frameworks. This approach underscored the interplay between technological innovation and broader societal contexts, enriching our understanding of the evolution of color in film.

The tools used for this research were FileMaker database, VIAN, and VIAN WebApp, alongside cloud computing on Microsoft Azure. While these tools can be effective, challenges still arise. In this case, the obstacles were connected to interpreting higher-order semantics in film analysis, such as intertextual references and emotional responses, alongside the superiority of computer-based approaches in color identification, despite the need for human interpretation.

Exploring the methods and challenges in film analysis was intriguing. The paper focused on temporal segmentation, figure-ground separation, colorimetric analyses, and spatial variation in color appearance. Findings highlighted numerous challenges, such as parsing films into coherent units, the evolution of tools like VIAN to simplify this task and the important role of human observers in pinpointing temporal units. Nevertheless, the article imparted valuable lessons, stressing the indispensability of interdisciplinary cooperation, user input, and the creation of adaptable visualization techniques.

The project emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach in analyzing film aesthetics and technology. It stresses the significance of detailed examination, relational database architecture, and the fusion of humanities with digital tools for a deeper comprehension of cinematic narratives. For cinephiles, grasping the methods used to scrutinize stylistic elements is essential, unlocking underlying meanings and uncovering symbolism that hides behind each color. As the study shows, it’s always possible to interpret colors in films in various ways, and most often they are chosen to be part of specific frames because of specific, significant reasons.  However, to  interpret the significance of colors in films, research tools alone may overlook the details and metaphorical significance of visual elements. A critical perspective, coupled with digital tools, remain imperative for generating meaningful insights.

 

 

Joining JRAAS has instilled in me a newfound curiosity to delve into Digital Humanities projects that speak to my interests and, in my research, I have found “TV Tropes-The Weird Geometry of the Internet” developed by Elijah Meeks, a data visualization expert, at Stanford University. The project aims to create visual network representations, to illustrate connections between different tropes, recurring plot devices, and works. By “mapping” out how tropes are linked to works and how the latter are linked through shared tropes, the aim is to analyze the thematic and narrative structures present in different media.

The challenge is in the difficulty to allow users an interactive approach, precisely because of the data’s large dimensions, but here is an attempt made of up of the 148 most central indices, works and tropes using the gexfjs library. Because of TV Tropes’s vast network, Meeks turns to other methods to better explore and interpret  data, such as modularity, allowing us to identify specific interconnected trope “communities’ ‘.

This way, Meeks divides these communities into “neighborhoods” such as Video Games (Green) – originally “Overcompensation”– so think of works that give the audience exactly what the title suggests like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer or Lampshade (Teal) – Originally “A Very TV Tropes Movie”,  encapsulating medium awareness. Friends often did this- in  Season 6, Episode 8, “The One with Ross’s Teeth”, the cold open features the One Hour Work-Week trope, where the characters complain about how their bosses don’t seem to like them and Joey (Matt Leblanc) retorts with “Maybe it’s because you’re in a coffee shop at 11:30 on a Wednesday morning?”.

Through these neighborhoods, Meeks ranks works on TV Tropes based on their thematic makeup and identifies the 50 most similar works based on shared tropes and percentages indicating their degree of similarity. For instance, I was amazed to find that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein apparently shares more tropes with the Planet of the Apes– 10 in total- than with the Bride of Frankenstein film- 6 tropes in total. As seen in Figure 2, the great majority of shared tropes and links fall into Id (Purple); Supernatural (Blue); Meta (Yellow) and Traditional (Red) categories.

It’s peculiar results like these that are worth exploring more in depth: questioning just how different narrative motifs “travel” across multiple genres. Research like this invites further questions like how can the analysis of shared tropes inform us of the evolution of storytelling across different forms of media over time or to what extent does fan culture influence trope categorization.

As someone who consumes multiple forms of media, everything from literature and cinema to video-games, I was drawn to this fascinating approach to tropes,  allowing me to explore connections across media I wouldn’t otherwise have ever thought about.