This research addresses the consequences of a shift from analogue to digital filmmaking on storytelling strategies in contemporary cinema. The drastic changes in the technology of representation...Show moreThis research addresses the consequences of a shift from analogue to digital filmmaking on storytelling strategies in contemporary cinema. The drastic changes in the technology of representation had a pivotal impact not only on the visual style of film, but have also lead to a rupture in the classic narrative tradition. Cause and effect strategies have been substituted by an inversely enthused logic of new media objects; consequently it is only viable to analyze contemporary cinema from this angle, addressing newly emerged complex narratives that have risen to the occasion in response to the ever-growing popularity of video games and the omnipresence of various web-based environments.Show less
While the use of computational strategies in humanistic inquiry have been discussed extensively, cultural, political and societal aspects of digital humanities tools have not been addressed.This...Show moreWhile the use of computational strategies in humanistic inquiry have been discussed extensively, cultural, political and societal aspects of digital humanities tools have not been addressed.This paper discusses the possibility and necessity of the tool criticism in digital humanities.Show less
Online reading networks are a form in which social reading becomes apparent in the digital age. They are compared to traditional reading groups and examined by their similarities and differences.
During an internship project at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands; KB) in The Hague the library’s Special Collections’ department requested a project be set up to...Show moreDuring an internship project at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands; KB) in The Hague the library’s Special Collections’ department requested a project be set up to examine the catalogue objects then described only as ‘collections’. Previous digitization projects had shown that these collections often contained prints or Plano’s that had remained uncatalogued as individual objects. The goal for this Plano project was to find and identify the objects in these collections and add them to the library’s catalogue as new, individual entities. During the first stages of the project over 2500 individual prints were discovered to be part of these ‘collection’ catalogue objects. Among these were eight folders of collected materials accompanied by handwritten notes and indexes. These folders were identified as the work of historian Georges-Joseph Gérard (1734-1814). This thesis argues that the eight folders are a part of Gérard’s planned Monumenta Historiae Belgicae project, a large-scale project with the intention of collecting all available source material on the history of the Southern Netherlands. Was the project important enough for Gérard to cut prints out of undamaged books, or did he acquire the source materials through other methods? The folders from the KB show that Gérard was not only an avid note-taker, but also a collector of prints.Show less
The aim of this thesis is to investigate how contemporary documentary is appropriating certain strategies that are traditionally only used in art, to question the difficulties of giving an accurate...Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to investigate how contemporary documentary is appropriating certain strategies that are traditionally only used in art, to question the difficulties of giving an accurate documentation of the world. A world that is never transparent or simple, conflicts and situations that are never black or white. For this I will look at the photographs by documentary photographer/artist Richard Mosse, as an example for the wider phenomenon in contemporary documentary, and investigate what strategies he uses to address the problems of documenting atrocities in Eastern Congo and narrating its complicated story to the viewers. I will investigate how the boundary between documentary and art in these strategies (and because of these strategies) is shifting, what the implications are and what effect this has on the viewers. For this thesis I will examine three main strategies Richard Mosse uses in his photographs: first, the use of a certain pre-determined concept and the negation of the decisive moment, as was long (at least until the 1980s) the characteristic of documentary photography and photojournalism. Second, the aesthetization of the documentary photograph and its increasing relationship to art and, third, the presentation of the work in both an installation form as well as the placement of these projects within a cultural and art institutional environment.Show less
In this thesis I sketch out a poetics of the love letter. With this poetics I propose that the structure of the love letter generates an uncanny form of textual presence of the lover in the text....Show moreIn this thesis I sketch out a poetics of the love letter. With this poetics I propose that the structure of the love letter generates an uncanny form of textual presence of the lover in the text. The lover’s presence is suggested by an interplay of three basic modes of address: the narratological mode of address (Bal, M.); the apostrophic mode of address (Culler J. et al.); the dialogic mode of address (Bakhtin, M. M.). This poetics of the love letter is mainly based on the close reading of the love letters of M. Tsvetajeva to A. Bachrach (1923) and the epistles of A. Chekhov and O. Knipper (1899 - 1904).Show less
During the last years of the reign of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany – from 1670 until his death in 1713 – the Florentine court faced the inevitable decline of the Medici dynasty. Cosimo’s zeal...Show moreDuring the last years of the reign of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany – from 1670 until his death in 1713 – the Florentine court faced the inevitable decline of the Medici dynasty. Cosimo’s zeal to stimulate industrial and technological innovations and to revitalize commerce resulted in an enormous expansion of correspondence and interchange between the Tuscan court and Europe in the 1660s. Once he came to power, Cosimo developed an interest in merchants who operated in the largest cities of Europe. Given the fact that the Grand Duke had a great fascination for the Dutch Republic, following his double stay there in 1667/1668 and 1669, the importance of Tuscan merchants in Amsterdam outweighed that of Medici traders in other European capitals. Among the scarce surviving correspondence of seventeenth-century Florentine merchants in the Low Countries, the most interesting may be that of Giovacchino Guasconi. During his tenure in Amsterdam as official agent for the Grand Duke, he wrote on average once a week to the Grand Ducal secretary, Apollonio Bassetti (1631-1699). This thesis explores the important role of Giovacchino Guasconi as intermediary between the cultural centres of Florence and Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, in particular his role as book agent between the well-known Dutch philologist Nicolaas Heinsius and Cosimo III.Show less
