Prof. Dr. Christoph Bareither
Key Projects (Currently Running)
Hybrid Epistemic Practices: Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Academic Assemblages in the Qualitative Social Sciences and Humanities
This project explores the transformative impact of generative artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI's GPT models, within the qualitative social sciences and humanities at the University of Tübingen. From an ethnographic perspective, it seeks to understand how students and academic staff are becoming early adopters of generative AI, how this technology is being integrated into hybrid epistemic practices, and its broader impact in academic assemblages. The ultimate goal is to lay a foundation for the development of critical AI literacy in order to help students, researchers, and academic stakeholders make more informed decisions in the context of generative AI.
Curating the Feed: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Digital Image Feeds and their Curatorial Assemblages
The key goal of the DFG-funded interdisciplinary research project “Curating the Feed” is to gain a better understanding of digital image feeds and their curatorial assemblages. We ask how ever-evolving networks of digital practices, user interfaces, and algorithms co-curate image feeds on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Pinterest. How are digital image feeds designed? How are they embedded in user interfaces and complex media environments? How are they algorithmically controlled, especially through the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning? And how are they entangled with the everyday lives of countless social media users? The project is part of the DFG priority programme The Digital Image and based at the University of Tübingen and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. It combines 1) digital anthropology (PI Christoph Bareither, University of Tübingen), 2) media studies and interface studies (PI Sabine Wirth, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), and 3) computer science and natural language processing (PI Benno Stein, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar).
From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Changing Memory Practices
The DFG-funded research project "From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Changing Memory Practices" is an interdisciplinary and international collaboration between the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Its core objective is to study the ongoing transformations of Holocaust commemoration in the digital generation. Our leading questions are twofold: How do digital media technologies generate new kinds of memory practice? And how do such practices of digital remembrance interact with more established memory practices that are anchored in places such as visits to concentration camps, museums and monuments? The ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach of the project provides a much-needed analysis of how established and emerging memory-practices juxtapose and entangle with one another.
Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe: The Role of Museums in a Digital 'Post-Truth' European Society (CHAPTER)
Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe: The Role of Museums in a Digital ‘Post-Truth’ European Society (CHAPTER) is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Through ethnographic research and digital innovation, it develops approaches and best practice examples to support museums in challenging the growing influence of populist discourse in Europe. The project is a collaboration of researchers in Berlin (project leader: Sharon Macdonald), Tübingen (project leader: Christoph Bareither), London (PI: Haidy Geismar) and Krakow (PI: Roma Sendyka) and museums in the respective countries. The advisory board has members from six European countries. The project will also cooperate with software developer Fluxguide in Vienna, with whom the team will develop and co-design a museum app together with young visitors from three European countries. The project brings together a broad range of anthropological fields, including digital and media anthropology, museum anthropology, political anthropology and the anthropology of emotions/affects. Based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, together with the Jagiellonian University (JU) in Krakow and University College London (UCL), the project aims to develop a European perspective on how museums can challenge populist truth-making in contemporary digital societies.
Key Projects (Concluded)
Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts
The DFG-funded research project Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts was located within the DFG priority programme “Das digitale Bild” / “The Digital Image” and brought ethnographic perspectives to bear on practices of digital curation in museums and heritage. The project was based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. With its main applicants being Christoph Bareither and Sharon Macdonald, it coupled the research expertise of museum and heritage studies with perspectives and approaches of media and digital anthropology, as well as information science, with Elke Greifeneder as project co-applicant.
For more details on smaller projects and student projects, please switch to the German version of this page.