Book Edition

Topography

Topology

Book Edition

Campus Medius explores and expands the possibilities of digital cartography in cultural and media studies. The book edition documents the development of the project from a historical case study to a mapping platform. Authored by the project head Simon Ganahl and designed in cooperation with Stefan Amann, it was published in English and German by transcript in 2022, namely both in print and electronically as open-access monograph. Based on the question of what a media experience is, the concepts of the apparatus (dispositif) and the actor-network are translated into a data model. A time-space of twenty-four hours in Vienna in May 1933, marked by a so-called "Turks Deliverance Celebration" (Türkenbefreiungsfeier), serves as an empirical laboratory. This Austrofascist rally is mapped from multiple perspectives and woven into media-historical networks, spanning from the seventeenth century up to the present day. The German-language book presentation took place at the University of Vienna on June 8, 2022.

Interview with the Author

Why publish a book on 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.

What new perspectives does the 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.

What makes the 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.

With whom would the author like to discuss the book?

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.

The book in one sentence:

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

Scholarly Reviews

Erkan Osmanović in medienimpulse, 60/3 (2022), pp. 1–6, here p. 6:

Simon Ganahl achieves a great feat: one not only reads about the phenomenon of media experiences, but also experiences them firsthand, including all the differentiations. This makes an immersion in Campus Medius a gain not only from a scholarly but also a personal perspective and should be imitated many times over.

Christian Zolles in Journal of Austrian Studies, 56/2 (2023), pp. 144–146, here p. 146:

Campus Medius offers a stimulating new approach to Austrian Studies and a very high level of fruitful theoretical insights and reflection. The project demonstrates the great potential of independent digital research in the humanities: We need more of this.

Jaimey Fisher in German Quarterly, 96/2 (2023), pp. 300–302, here p. 300:

Campus Medius takes a scholarly, sophisticated, and highly innovative step in pushing German(-language) digital humanities forward, with its intriguing insights spanning German and Austrian Studies, Media Studies, and cultural history more broadly—while exploring the rich intersections between and among all four of those fields.

Wolfgang Pensold in medien & zeit, 38/1 (2023), pp. 59–61:

Precisely because it is so difficult to reconstruct and present the most diverse facets of an issue in their interactions at the same time, one of the undeniable merits of this approach is to concede the historical subject its multidimensionality, not to reduce it to one-dimensional perspectives. […] Undoubtedly, the project points the way that will (also) have to be taken in the new historiographical age. […] Formally, it remains to be noted that the text is formulated in a markedly comprehensible manner, despite the sometimes quite complex subject matter, radiating high professional competence and linguistic mastery.