Images of writers on YouTube. The place of literature in new media

Abstract

This work stems from a question: How YouTube is building in the place of literature, being this a highly legitimized through the mechanisms of literacy (OLSON 1998) social discourse? This culture is characterized by the predominance of written verbal text, which allows for long-term archiving systems ordered cataloging. The written text may be classifiable in various ways, among which is the possibility of cataloging chronologically, by author and by gender discourse, specially, can be long-term archiving, constituting an important part of the historical memory (CHARTIER 2006). Now, what about literature when it is moved from the textual materiality to visual, and legal culture to digital visual culture (BREA 2007)? Following the question of a general nature, and following the theoretical and methodological approaches to distant Reading (MORETTI 2007), cultural analytics (MANOVICH 2012) and digital humanities (BERRY 2011), we analyzed the descriptive data associated with 1000 videos posted on YouTube whose reference is the Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, in order to identify which image of those writers is built on that platform through a distant reading of his content, users producers, and the thematic classification of videos.