Hacking Printed Social-Ecological Journals from the 1970s Onwards
What is the project about?
The project is about hacking printed socio-ecological journals from the era of the 1970s and 80s and from different countries in regard to their topics, images and layouts. We chose three periodicals from France (La Gueule ouverte), Germany (Wechselwirkung) and the U.S. (The Whole Earth Catalog, Coevolution quarterly) for a proof of concept. Our interest is understanding ideas and themes from the early era of ecology and how they relate to the present such as energy, system science, ecological crisis, futures, or the role of technology. The peculiarity of the corpus is its creative layouts with manifold text-image relations and many image types such as photographs, illustrations and caricatures. Therefore we needed to develop a database, which allows to analyse texts and images in their original layout contexts and doesn't separate images from texts.
References and links
What is your research question?
What topics and topoi do we find in the journals? How can DH help to reconstruct a history of ideas? How can we structure the information (images, layout, texts) in printed periodicals in order to do quantitative analysis? How can eco-social periodicals be re-interpreted through speculative methods? What can we learn from the early environmental movement? In what ways do environmental discourses differ in printed periodicals from the U.S., France, Germany?
How is the project and/or case situated?
The group members have backgrounds in design, ecology, political science, social sciences, art, art history, digital humanities, literature studies, media studies, cultural studies and history.
What methods, data sets, and tools are used?
- Data: 23 pdfs of Whole Earth Catalogue, 66 pdfs Whole Earth Review, 41 pdfs Co-Evolution Quaterly; 314 pdfs La gueule ouvert, 45 pdfs of Wechselwirkung
- Methods: ORC (Mistral OCR, glm5.1, gemma4, qwen 3,6), vMkDocs, image segmentation (yolo), multi-modal vectorization of the layouts (siglip2), topic modelling, Gallicagram (textrometrics), vector data base (weaviate), IIIF meta data parsing, sentence segementation, vector search …
Who is part of the team?
Camille Belmin, Aristide Curtelin, Marie Grau, Juliane Mueller, Sybille Neumeyer, Reto Riggs, Birgit Schneider, Julien Schuh, Anne-Violaine Szabados, Silvan auf der Maur, Evi Zemanek, Mela Zuljevic