Visit of fellows Heisman Arcila and Gicela Aguirre, 10.06.2023-10.07.2023

Heisman Arcila and Gicela Aguirre, two guest researchers from our cooperation team at the Universidad de Antioquia, are working closely with GUMELAB on e-research and the use of digital media. Gicela Aguirre García is working on her PhD at the Latin America Institute of the Free University of Berlin with digital methods related to the armed conflict in Colombia. Heisman Arcila's research focuses on digital methods, working with cognitive agents and training models, Big Data, Deep and Machine Learning. Both are part of the team led by Prof. Dr. Leonardo Pachón at the University of Antioquia (Medellín - Colombia) that researches on the access and automated analysis of data on social media such as Twitter and YouTube using trained models. GUMELAB's research project can gain insight into what topics people in Latin America, the U.S., and Germany discuss through the narratives dejpicted through comments and tweets generated while watching telenovelas and series. Together with qualitative interviews conducted during the field research visits, the data can be used to measure the influence of series and telenovelas on historical consciousness, memory images, and political education.

During their research stay, both fellows, together with the Brazilian guest researcher Alesson Rota and project collaborator Hannah Müssemann, wrote a handbook on employing digital methods in humanities projects. The publication of this handbook is scheduled for the end of 2023 and, based on the experience gained in the interdisciplinary team, will also open the methodology for future projects that aim at working with digital methods. Likewise, further internal workshops on the definition of artificial intelligence were held, as well as discussions on the opportunities and challenges of the e-research component in the research project with the GUMELAB team.