Understand human creativity through the representation of time in conversation, film and literature.
Cristóbal Pagán, researcher of the ICS of the University, will develop in Amsterdam part of the project CREATIME thanks to a EURIAS Fellowship.
PHOTO: Manuel Castells
Cristóbal Pagán, researcher of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, has been awarded a scholarship EURIAS Fellowship. With it he will develop at the Institute for Advanced programs of study of the Netherlands part of the line of research CREATIME, which seeks to understand human creativity by studying how time is imagined and represented in conversation, film and literature.
Dr. Pagán will join a community of interdisciplinary experts specialized in their areas of work. Among other topics, they address issues such as "multimodal communication, gestures, combining images with words with a cognitive approach and making programs of study multimodal metaphor, and cognitive linguistics groups with which my team has affinity," he explained.
Since its inception in 2015, the project has been primarily devoted to collecting data on time-related gestures and expressions. With that substrate, the researcher will now focus on more theoretical aspects with the goal to "write good general comparative analyses of the data there are and their theoretical significance, as well as what these data and CREATIME analyses can teach researchers interested in the comparative study of large data of different modalities."
The project CREATIMEThe project CREATIME is made up of researchers from the project 'Public discourseThe team is formed by researchers from the ICS, the University of Murcia, the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and the University of Lancaster (UK). This team tries to understand how time is represented in conversation, literature and cinema by studying verbal expression, gestural expression and cinematographic techniques.
According to Cristóbal Pagán, they mainly focus on spatial terms, as they are used to materialize abstract concepts of time such as 'spring is coming' or 'the days are flying'. The collection of data has been done through the database NewsScape television news, which is part of the Library Services of the University of California. According to the researcher, they search the database for expressions of time in conversations and analyze the accompanying gestures. More than 10,000 video clips have already been annotated.
The EURIAS (European Institutes for Advanced Study) Fellowship program allows researchers - mainly from Humanities and social sciences - to develop their work in advanced research centers for a period of 10 months in a high school of advanced programs of study , to be chosen from 18 European countries. This initiative is part of the group NetIAS (network of Advanced programs of study Institutes in Europe), of which 22 centers in Europe are members.