Who am I?
Hello cool cats and kittens,
my name is Hans Bouchard and I am a PhD student / research assistant at the Ruhr-University at Bochum (Germany) at the Department for Romance Studies (Spanish literature and culture).
I am currently researching Mexican communities and forms of representations on YouTube for my PhD project titled: „El señor YouTube“: Mexikanische Social Media Communities in den virtuell-medialen Räumen der Produktion und Vernetzung [„El señor YouTube“: Mexican social media communities in virtual media spaces of connection and production].
My main research interests are:
- Mexican literature / (pop)culture
- Social platforms: representations, infrastructure and cultural practices
- Conceptual and metaphor theory
I am also a non-professional orchestra musician playing the trumpet.
Why this blog?
1.) Even though my research field allows for current research topics our publication forms are somewhat archaic (book publication/monographies). As a language professional, I know that it is a very strong tool of (re)presentation, however, I noted that it was insufficient to show specific media objects, their relations and forms of representation.
How to present channelIDs, playlists and discourse happening on several pages at once within a specific time frame? How to showcase the interplay between infrastructure, user practices and media concepts?
For that, I will talk about language and concepts, as it is abundantly used in forms of concepts, and (web)ontologies that become vital structures for online platforms. I will also try to replicate my findings here and document them directly, which won’t be possible in a pure analogue text document.
I hope this blog environment allows for a more direct approach of translating and presenting my findings, as well as facilitating the research process by directly validating/falsifying my propositions and hypotheses.
2) The publication practices in 1) also lead to an holistic approach of (PhD) research productions: „You have 3 years and then you submit your manuscript“.
However, this is not representative of research at all. It is not only about the results, which in this form are compiled in one large manuscript containing several years of your life. It is an ongoing process, where you observe, analyze, fail and try again. Most of the work you do will never be visible (but that might also be true for most professions).
Therefore, I will try to fragment this opus into small thematic blocks and situate and contextualize the findings. This should facilitate to speak about the research as well as present it in a readable and transparent format.
3.) As with athletes and musicians, the main part of our work lies in practicing and training, not necesarrily in competing and performing. The scientific „competitions“ and „performances“ are also very important and find their equivalent concepts in „publications“ and „presentations“ but not here.
This is not a place of scientific competition. It is an open workshop , where research findings and certain topics of the web environment are presented and brought together.
Nevertheless, research needs review and discussion, however polished or transformed it might be! I strongly encourage this and will try to promote this discussion and critique whenever possible.
The findings/research presented here might be transformed in order to fit this blog format and might not be conclusive and peer-reviewed. Please do not cite any article/post as conclusive evidence for specific research questions! I will cite and link to published sources accordingly.
What does digitaco mean / What is this about?
For this I wrote the startup post: „What’s a digitaco“