Understanding people's views and visions. : A semiotic and cultural approach of online amateur audiovisual productions

MasterThis is the support of a three-day seminar of the "European Master in InterCultural Communication (EMICC)" program, given at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano (CH). The seminar deals with strategies and techniques for analyzing amateur video productions in order to reconstruct underlying cultural visions. In reference to Michel Foucault's studies of historical archives, the aim of this seminar is to initiate a kind of "archeology" of the to-day's common-sense rationality (of collectively shared epistemic standards) through a systematic analysis of corpora of amateur audiovisual productions uploaded in digital audiovisual archves and libraries or on platforms such as You Tube, Daily Motion, etc. In this 3-days seminar three concrete examples of amateur audiovisual production are analyzed. The first example is a very basic video of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. The second example is a more elaborated amateur video provided by an anonymous author on YouTube and showing us the visit of the Shueisian temple in Dingcaiyuan, Taiwan. The third example is a montage of historical amateur shoots showing us different scenes of the daily life of the Japanese community in the USA during the first decades of the 20th century