EDUC Research collaboration: the EcoMedia project

General presentation

In May 2025, Université Paris Nanterre launched a call for proposals aimed at federating research communities involving the alliance's foreign universities. The EcoMedia project was awarded a grant from the EDUC network, enabling the development of partnerships on a European scale around scientific and technological projects, and generate preliminary results on common research and innovation topics.
 
 

Presentation of the project

EcoMedia: ecological imaginaries and media ecology (19th - 21st centuries)
The EcoMedia project aims to set up a Franco-German research group dedicated to the analysis of environmental representations through visual and textual corpora (illustrated press, company magazines, posters, photographic collections, natively digital documents). It seeks to understand how European societies have represented, debated and imagined the environment, from the 19th century to the present day, by focusing on two axes: ecological imaginaries, through the study of visual and textual narratives shaping our perceptions of nature, and media ecology, through the analysis of technical media conditioning our understanding of the environmental crisis.

 

Framing Workshop “Visual Ecology & Archives”

Campus of Paris Nanterre, 12 December 2025, 6 flash presentations

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 (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996; Garrard 2014). 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 (Parkins and Adkins 2018). Likewise, in the contemporary era, the climate crisis is largely apprehended via images (“Écologies visuelles” 2023). 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 (Schneider and Nocke 2014, Schneider et al. 2023).

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 (Castro et al. 2024). 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 (Mooseder et al. 2023).

Finally, the EcoMedia project also carries a methodological ambition: it is rooted in the field of digital humanities, mobilizing tools of artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis alongside humanities methods. The Franco-German consortium intends to combine the “visual ecology” approach developed in Potsdam (the study of images in their contexts and circulations) with the advances of the pictorIA consortium (Nanterre) in automatic extraction of visual forms and motifs through AI. The objective is to test multimodal methods combining image and text analysis, computer vision, network analysis, and historical contextualization. This collaborative project will build an expanded corpus (illustrated press 1830–1914, industrial journals 1920–1970, digital posts 2000–2024) and apply AI algorithms to detect iconographic trends and networks of similarity at a scale impossible to cover manually. The aim is to treat these collections both as quantitative data and as historical documents: to align digital tools with the scale of the phenomenon under study (the rise of an international visual culture) in order to better understand the historical processes that have shaped how our societies perceive the world.

In practice, this will take the form of pooling expertise in computer vision and visual history during workshops and hackathons. EcoMedia seeks to bring together a transnational research community around the environmental history of media, while producing open resources and paving the way for a larger European project.

 

Project Leaders

Prof. Dr. Birgit Schneider, birgit.schneider@uni-potsdam.de
Prof. Dr. Peer Trilcke, Universität Potsdam, trilcke@uni-potsdam.de 
Julien Schuh, Université Paris Nanterre, jschuh@parisnanterre.fr

 

Bibliography

- Castro, Teresa, Brenda Lynn Edgar, and Estelle Sohier. “Introduction. Les histoires écologiques de la photographie.” Transbordeur. Photographie histoire société, no. 8 (February 2024): 8. https://doi.org/10.4000/12gw0.
- Cultures visuelles. “Écologies visuelles / Visual ecologies.” July 25, 2023. https://www.culturesvisuelles.org/champs-de-recherche/ecologies-visuelles/ecologies-visuelles.
- « Écologies visuelles : Expérience et vie des images à l’heure du capitalocène », Call for Papers, Calenda, December 18, 2023. https://doi.org/10.58079/1cf6.
- Garrard, Greg, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. University of Georgia Press, 1996.
- Mooseder, Angelina, Cornelia Brantner, Rodrigo Zamith, and Jürgen Pfeffer. “(Social) Media Logics and Visualizing Climate Change: 10 Years of #climatechange Images on Twitter.” Social Media + Society 9, no. 1 (2023): 20563051231164310. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231164310.
- Parkins, Wendy, and Peter Adkins. “Introduction: Victorian Ecology and the Anthropocene.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 26 (July 2018). https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.818.
- Schneider, Birgit, and Thomas Nocke, eds. Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations. Transcript, 2014.
- Schneider, Birgit and Thomas Nocke, Janna Kienbaum, Paul Heinicker: “Interpreting Climate Images on the Internet: Mixing Algorithmic and Interpretive Views to Enable an Intercultural Comparison (ANCI)“, In: Mixing Methods. An Agenda for the Humanities in the Digital Age, ed. by Beate Löffler, Tino Mager, Birgit Schneider, und Carola Hein, 189–212. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839469132-020.