A Short Scientific Report
after completion of the Short Term Scientific Mission at Faculty of Fine Arts School of Film Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece concerning the research
Virtual Knowledge (Exploring Research Methodology and Epistemology in Humanities, Film Studies and Social Sciences)
The main aim of this short term scientific meeting at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was to establish a research collaboration with Prof. Dr. Despina Mouzaki, who is a Dean of the School of Film Studies and one of the major names of the Films Studies today. The idea was to set and to develop new research epistemology perspectives of Film Studies today, and not just to research through the always already known concepts of phenomenology of film knowledge, but to get to another level of knowledge, that is the idea of art of knowledge, today. During this scientific research we started with arising ‘ars memoriae’ mnemonic techniques, as an idea for organization of the economy of knowledge and memory traces (the etymology is Greek), connected to the semantic technologies of knowledge organization. We have been continued to set up something that we have called ‘’virtual maps’’ of memory of cultural and digital facts/ data, for developing the current methods in (e)humanities for cartographic visualization of film knowledge and understanding movies as “data”, during the cinema archiving processes. This approach leads us up to the reactualizing the ontology and epistemology of knowledge at the new level of thinking and exploring.
With this research we have got some important results:
- Arising of methods of “digital film archeology’’ as the main method that I take from the Film Studies and Production of Films, with an aim to treat the film as “digit data” and to show that clusters of film data visualization interfaces that are crucial for understanding the hermeneutics of virtual knowledge and developing of new contemporary humanities and social sciences ways of thinking and understanding the different disciplines.
- We open the terrain of contemporary narratology that is important for this research at the level of analyzing the stages of focalization during the film archiving and to show how it helps to navigate through contents of information and memorizing the location related to one cultural digital art/fact, today.
- This research shows how film data “memory islands’’ influence the changing nature of filmmakers in the digital age (Negri, Hardt) of cinema and (e)humanities.
- This research opens the concept of virtual knowledge and transition of ‘film data’ into ontology of memory islands discourses. That was visualization of the task we wanted to aim.
- This research shows how to be engaged into collaborative digit cartography and cinematic work, and how important is to work together, turning raw film data material and archival data into systematic, comprehensible and usable film database records, into the science for film production and opening the new directions into film technology studies.
We constitute further research plan and invitations in between us, Prof. Dr. Despina Mouzaki to come and to work with postgraduate students in Macedonia and vice versa I intend to give a lecture at the Department of Film Studies at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and to continue this important collaboration between us through our further research projects and beautiful work research plan.
Best
Assistant Professor Dr. Senka Anastasova
Thessaloniki-Skopje 2016, October
