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Framing Workshop “Visual Ecology & Archives” (12 dec. 2025, Université Paris Nanterre)

Date: 12 December 2025, 14h-17h
Location: Université Paris Nanterre, Bâtiment Weber, Salle de conférence (Amphithéâtre)
https://daloe.parisnanterre.fr/nos-poles/ade-pilotage/amphitheatre-w-test


The EcoMedia project, developed within the framework of the EDUC European Alliance, aims to study how European societies, from the nineteenth century to the present day, have represented, debated, and imagined nature and the environment through various visual and textual media.

Two main research axes structure this project: first, ecological imaginaries, i.e., the narratives and images that shape our perception of nature; and second, media ecology, i.e., the analysis of technical media supports (illustrated press, photography, posters, digital media, etc.) and their influence on how the environmental crisis is perceived.

The first axis seeks to understand how representations of nature and the environment in culture (whether in literature, the visual arts, or the media) have constructed our relationship to the natural world. Ecocriticism, a discipline that emerged within literary and cultural studies, demonstrates that artistic and narrative constructions of “nature” at each historical moment deeply shape contemporary perceptions of the environment. In other words, it is a matter of examining how nature was staged and what vision of the human–nature relationship resulted. In the nineteenth century, the popular illustrated press abounded with images of landscapes, natural phenomena, and colonial adventures in the wilderness; these descriptions of the environment fueled the Victorian public imagination and offer insight into the evolution of collective environmental sensibilities. Likewise, in the contemporary era, the climate crisis is largely apprehended via images. In this sense, studying visual and textual narratives of nature helps us understand how the ecological imaginary has been constructed and how it influences our reactions to the current crisis.

The second axis, media ecology, invites us to consider media themselves as environments. Each technical medium, from the nineteenth-century wood engraving to twenty-first-century social media, constitutes a particular ecosystem with its own codes, temporality, and audience, conditioning the circulation and impact of images. The history of environmental representations is therefore inseparable from the material history of media. The mediological hypothesis of the project is that technical evolutions (illustrated press, photography, television, internet, etc.) have altered the ways the environment is represented, and consequently, the ways the public becomes aware of it. Media logics shape both the content and the reception of environmental images.


Programme

14h00: Fantin Le Ber & Julien Schuh (MSH Mondes) – “The pictorIA consortium – AI and visual culture”

The Huma-Num consortium pictorIA brings together researchers and heritage institutions to develop shared tools, datasets, and critical approaches for applying artificial intelligence to the analysis and preservation of visual culture.

Fantin Le Ber is a research engineer within the pictorIA consortium.
Julien Schuh is professor at Université Paris Nanterre and deputy director of the MSH Mondes.


14h25: Prof. Birgit Schneider(University of Potsdam) & Dr. Paul Heinicker (Fachhochschule Potsdam) – “Revisiting Networked Climate Images in a Changed Visual Ecology”

A retrospective and recontextualization of the project “Analysing Networked Climate Images”, tracking shifts in climate discourse, algorithmic infrastructures, and emergent challenges for visual methods.

Paul Heinicker is a design researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, focusing on the culture and politics of data-influenced images.

Birgit Schneider is professor for Knowledge Cultures and Media Environments in the Department of European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany, focusing on scientific images, the history and present-day status of data visualizations and especially climate visualizations at the intersection of science, aesthetics and politics. She publishes in the fields of climate discourse, cultural geography, media studies and environmental humanities.


14h50: Dr. Luca Giovannini (University of Potsdam) – “Building a participative digital humanities network: the Potsdam example”

The talk recounts the experience of building a community-driven digital humanities network at the University of Potsdam, with a particular emphasis on its flagship project DraCor (dracor.org) and on the DH hackathon series.

Dr. Luca Giovannini works as research coordinator for the Digital Humanities Network at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests focus on computational literary studies and cultural analytics.


15h15: Rafael Damasceno Ramalho Pereira (PhD Candidate in Anthropology, Université Paris Nanterre) – “An ethnographic study of the Brazilian Amazon satellite monitoring system”

Over recent months, I have been conducting an ethnographic study with the Amazon monitoring team at the Brazilian Biomes Monitoring Program (BiomasBR), part of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). BiomasBR produces the Brazilian government’s official data on land use and land cover. My main focus is understanding the historical process of representing and controlling the forest with digital technologies. Through this fieldwork, I have followed two key processes: (1) an attempt to semi-automate Amazon monitoring and (2) a shift in deforestation patterns that shook both the known history of the rainforest and the AI models designed to classify satellite data. 

Rafael Damasceno is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Université Paris Nanterre and a Wadsworth Fellow at the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Working in the anthropology of science and technology, his research examines AI systems in scientific practices, recently focusing on remote sensing, satellite data, and the monitoring of the Amazon rainforest.


15h40: Coffee Break


15h50: Danaë di Salvo (BnF) – “Gallica Images – Using digital innovation and AI to preserve national heritage”

Gallica Images is a French program that deploys artificial-intelligence pipelines to unlock, enrich and sustain one of Europe’s largest complex-image databases, high-resolution scans of manuscripts, maps, posters, photographs and periodicals held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. By combining computer vision, deep-learning segmentation and multilingual OCR, the project automatically generates rich metadata, searchable captions and semantic links, turning static pixels into living, findable knowledge while guaranteeing long-term preservation and open, rights-cleared reuse for researchers, educators and creators worldwide.

Danaë di Salvo is Project Manager, Lead UX @ Gallica images.


16h15: Julie Sohier – “Understanding the emergence of agricultural chemistry in France in the mid-19th century through quantitative data analysis”

The agricultural press of the period, together with the methodology developed within the ISOCO project, makes it possible to frame the debates that took place in the 19th century around the development of chemical fertilizers, to identify the key actors, and to map their positions within contemporary scholarly controversies. This approach consists in building a usable corpus from scattered historical documents already digitized online (Gallica, RetroNews) and, through textual processing with the IRaMuTeQ software, providing transversal, readable, and shareable access to a very large volume of data.

Julie Sohier is a graduate of AgroParisTech and École des Ponts ParisTech, has completed continuing education at the UFR SSA, and holds a Master’s degree in Research in History and Social Sciences of Politics under the supervision of Patrice Baubeau and Laurent Herment, within the ISOCO laboratory. She is Executive Director of POLLINIS (pollinis.org).


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Julien Schuh (22 octobre 2025). Framing Workshop “Visual Ecology & Archives” (12 dec. 2025, Université Paris Nanterre). Consortium-HN pictorIA. Consulté le 11 novembre 2025 à l’adresse https://pictoria.hypotheses.org/6010


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