Main Content
Niels-Oliver Walkowski
Affiliation & Contact
University of Luxembourg
Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education
E-Mail: niels-oliver.walkowski[at]uni.lu
Twitter: @cutuchiqueno
ORCID:0000-0003-3043-3010
Zotero
Research Areas
Cinemetrics, Computer Vision, Stylometry, Hybrid Publishing, Digital Studies
Biography
Niels-Oliver Walkowski is a research scientist for digital literacy and research at the University of Luxembourg. Before, he worked for several years at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in research projects from the area of Digital Humanities, including the European-level project ‘Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities’ (DARIAH) and the repository for prosopographical research data (Personendatenrepositorium). His main areas of interest are the impact of computational technologies on Humanities research, cinemetrics and computational media analysis. For his enquiry into the topic of digital scholarly publishing he received a PhD in literature at the Catholic University of Leuven. He co-founded and coordinated the working group ‘Film and Video’ hosted by the scientific association ‘Digital Humanities in German Speaking Countries` (DHd) and is a member in the steering committee of the special interest group ‘AudioVisual Material in DH’ at the ‘Association of Digital Humanities Organizations’ (ADHO).
Current Research
Together with my colleague Johannes Pause, I currently apply computational strategies to the analysis of visual and aesthetic narratives in zombie movies as well as political thrillers. Connecting to research in film genre theory, we especially ask for how these narratives relate to different concepts of political power. At the same time, we develop ‘Cittena’, a programming library in Python for the analysis of visual properties in digital moving-image corpora. The broader reflection on our specific use of computation in research encouraged us to create the concept of ‘Scalable Viewing’. Under this theme, we develop a methodology that draws a more complex image of computer-assisted research than that emphasized by terms such as distant reading, big data and quantification. Consequently, more than extending the scales of these areas computer assisted research enables the strategic design of transitions between close and distant reading, detail and big data as well as hermeneutics and measurements. It makes research more dynamic.
Network-related Publications (selection)
◦ Burghardt, Manuel, Adelheid Heftberger, Johannes Pause, Niels-Oliver Walkowski, and Matthias Zeppelzauer (Ed.). Digital Humanities & Film Studies: Analyzing the Modalities of Moving Images. Digital Humanities Quarterly Special Issue. Boston: ADHO, forthcoming.
◦ Heftberger, Adelheid, Claudia Müller-Birn, Jakob Höper, and Niels-Oliver Walkowski. ‘Opening up Research Data in Film Studies by Using the Structured Knowledge Base Wikidata’. In Digital Cultural Heritage, edited by Horst Kremers, 401–10, 2019.
◦ Pause, Johannes, and Niels-Oliver Walkowski. ‘Taxonomien computergestützter Forschung und Scalable Viewing’. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften - Open Media Studies Blog, 11 March 2019. https://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/open-media-studies-blog/taxonomien-computergestützter-forschung(Teil 1), https://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/open-media-studies-blog/taxonomien-computergestützter-forschung (Teil 2)
◦ Walkowski, Niels-Oliver. Beyond the Flow. Digital Publications during and after the Digital. Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2019. 10.14619/1600
◦ Walkowski, Niels-Oliver, and Johannes Pause. ‘Everything is Illuminated. Zur Numerischen Analyse von Farbigkeit in Filmen’. Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften, 2018.
