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SECTION:
Cultural Aspects of Visualization in the Social and Cultural Sciences
Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Papers to:
Email: Klaus Feldmann (Hannover)
ABSTRACT: Cultural and social scientists learn a specific, professional way of approaching their fields and then strengthen these methods in their subsequent professional life. Because of this they are usually blind or, let us say, not very open to the new possibilities offered by visualization or the multimedia. Because of their linguistic and often also their regional ties, the texts of social and cultural scientists, by preserving culture, act as a barrier to inter and multicultural communication. This provincialism, which is not to be judged as totally negative, was to be sure improved by the gradual, technologically driven universalization and possibly also by anglification, without of course eliminating the negative attitude toward the picture. The use of visual means can not only foster multiculturalism and intercultural communication, but will also provide the best opportunities for innovative theory and for the mediation of scientific knowledge to members of other groups both within and outside the field of culture. In this way it will achieve the union of science and other institutions, above all the media and schools. By means of new forms of visualization, the partly counterproductive boundaries between the scientific disciplines, which in the way they were created historically have erected their own "cultural limits", will to some degree be overcome. Visualization as a means of mediating science has been practiced for some time now, above all in the mass media, while cultural and social scientists have up to now continued to react with criticism, with resistance or by ignoring it altogether. A positive and productive examination of this "Trend" appears overdue. The results of research in various ancillary disciplines such as semiotics, film and television analysis, visual sociology and visual anthropology, are of great importance for the development of new theoretical, methodological and didactic conceptions.
In this section innovative concepts of visualization and new methodological procedures will be presented, opportunities for intercultural scientific communication offered for consideration and transcultural uses of the visual that embrace all institutions discussed.
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