Huldigung der Wissenschaften und Künste, Bildauschnitt

NFDI4Culture Community Media Studies

Media studies in the context of cultural studies deals with the theory, history and aesthetics of media and media systems, especially from the point of view of their social functions, their technical conditionality and their cultural integration, acceptance and effects. In German-speaking areas, the discipline is represented by the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft.

With regard to research data, there is an urgent need for the discipline to create standards for the documentation of research objects and to develop controlled vocabularies and classifications of the data collected from these objects. Existing standards, e.g. for the identification of works, still leave many questions unanswered. In addition, there is a lack of structure to connect and liaise between media studies research projects which already gather research data to facilitate the exchange of concepts, experiences and practices. Another important concern of the discipline is the development of collaborative data repositories and research environments for specific questions (for instance around the production, distribution or screening of film and TV works) as well as the development of non-proprietary tools for online research. Furthermore, researchers require ways to sustainably preserve research data as well as (old) collections of media art, net art, net literature, experimental media studies websites, and games that are worth preserving.

In view of these needs for media studies, NFDI4Culture regards itself as a platform for  networking and discussion on the topic of research data, but also as a specific point of contact for providing guidance to researchers, for example on questions around the selecion of repositories and the indexing and preparation of collections and archives. The consortium facilitates the coordination process with other disciplines and on specific data types, and provides cross-disciplinary expertise for media studies with regard to the development of vocabularies. The Cultural Research Data Academy (CRDA) of NFDI4Culture also hosts subject-specific workshops on data literacy, oversees the design of teaching materials on this topic, and offers expert advice and support for the integration of data literacy content into curricula.

User Story 07

As a music ethnologist, I am responsible for keeping audio/video files (or corpora) created during my research accessible in accordance with the preconcerted legal agreements. Since I am also involved in teaching, I would like to pass on my expertise on this form of analysis to my students so they can apply these skills.
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As curator of the contemporary collection of a large museum, I would like to make our bundle of video art and the performance documentation accessible for research.

User Story 25

As a Wikimedian I am happy to be involved in the digital cultural commons and have already made many edits on Wikipedia pages about cultural heritage and made pictures available for free use at WM Commons. I have made contributions to Europeana’s crowd sourcing projects, such as annotating pictures from the 1st World War. I am particularly interested in providing my specialized knowledge on Corinthian temples for various digital objects. I am pleased if this knowledge can be made available a human- and machine-readable way and be reused in research and I can help expanding the general body of knowledge in this field while doing so.

Members of the NFDI4Culture Steering Board Community Representatives