Holle Meding is a German historian and digital humanities researcher. She specializes in the application of digital methods and neural networks in history and the study of historical framing in the media. She also works on the history of the German cult Colonia Dignidad in southern Chile, which collaborated with the Chilean secret service during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and committed serious human rights crimes. Since 2021 she has been working as a researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin in the BMBF-project GUMELAB.

Curriculum Vitae

2024 - present: PhD Candidate in History

2018 - 2020: History, M.A. - Freie Universität Berlin

2017 - 2020: Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies, M.A. - Freie Universität Berlin

2014 - 2017: Regional Studies Latin America, B.A. - Universität zu Köln

Academic career

2021 - 2024: Research assistant in the BMBF research project: History Transfer through Entertainment Media in Latin America. Laboratory for Memory and Digital Media Research

2020 - 2021: Research assistant at the Historical Research Centre. Leibniz-Institut for Spatial Social Research (IRS)

2018 - 2020: Student assistant in the DFG-funded project German Police Assistance in Latin America (1949 - 1989): Scope, Practices and Transnational Entanglements, LAI, Freie Universität Berlin

2016 - 2017: Student Assistant in Linguistic and Computational Information Processing, Universität zu Köln

Scholarships and fellowships

2023 - Research and visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute's Pacific Office, University of California, Berkeley

2022 - Research and visiting fellow at Facultad de Comunicación e Imagen, Universidad de Chile

2018 -  Study semester at El Colegio de México (Mexiko City): Doctoral programme in History, funded by the DAAD

2016 - Study semester at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago de Chile), funded by the DAAD

Field Research and International Experience

2023 - Research and visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute's Pacific Office, University of California, Berkeley

2022 - Citizen Science-Dialoge Trip Colombia (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali)

2022 - Research and visiting fellow at Facultad de Comunicación e Imagen, Universidad de Chile. Field research on the reception of Chilean series about the military dictatorship

2018 - Research stay at the Instituto de Historia de Cuba

2018 - Study and research stay in Mexico City (El Colegio de México). Field research on German-Mexican relations during the Cold War

2016 - Study semester at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago de Chile) andField research in the Villa Baviera (former Colonia Dignidad)

2024

Summer Term 2024 - Colonia Dignidad: Between Public History and Entertainment: From the Cold War to the Streaming Age" in the seminar "Colonia Dignidad: From model settlement to torture camp?" (FU Berlin, Prof. Dr. Stefan Rinke, Dr. Tomás Villaroel)

Summer Term 2024 - "Tracing the origins of the Colonia Dignidad. Paul Schäfer and the Private Sociale Mission" in the seminar "Colonia Dignidad: From model settlement to torture camp?" (FU Berlin, Prof. Dr. Stefan Rinke, Dr. Tomás Villaroel)

2022

Winter Term 2022 - "Media Representation of the GDR and Discourses of Memory" in the seminar "Memory and popular culture", (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, Prof. Dr. Tatjana Louis)

Summer Term 2022 - Seminar: Telenovelas and TV series as mediators of memory. Development and reflection of digital methods for the analysis of reception in social networks, (Lateinamerika Institut, FU Berlin)

2021

Summer Term 2021 - Teaching unit: "Colonia Dignidad: Media's Role in Historical Interpretation", in the seminar "Colonia Dignidad: From model settlement to torture camp?" (FU Berlin, Prof. Dr. Stefan Rinke, Prof. Dr. Ingrid Kummels)

PhD Project: Historical Framing in Entertainment Media about the Chilean Military Dictatorship

The dissertation project examines the mass media communication of historical narratives in Chile, focusing on series about the military dictatorship. Themes, forms of representation, developmental processes, and audience response will be identified and analyzed. On the conceptual level, the historical and content-related orientation of the series, the respective target group and intentionality, including commercial considerations, will be discussed. On the performative level, the staging, dramatic means, series design, and genre specifics will be examined, and strategies of authentication and dramatization will be critically evaluated. In a further step, external influences on focus, design and statements will be identified, especially in productions supported by state-funded television stations with a public educational mandate. Finally, taking into account these data, the impact of the historical-fictional representation on the viewers' perception of history will be measured on a third level. For this purpose, the range of opinions on the series episodes in the social networks will be determined. Selective, mostly contemporary statements on series events, protagonists, and contexts will be recorded, regardless of whether they are factually critical, reflexive, or emotional. To this end, algorithms will be developed to filter and categorize mass data from social networks, primarily Twitter, by means of automated processes (natural language processing, NLP), so that they can then be subjected to quantitative and qualitative analysis. The specific discourse format of the social medium will be empirically analyzed to determine which narratives users accept or reject and whether viewers' historical perspectives change measurably over the course of the broadcast.  The aim is to examine and decipher, through selected case studies, the relationships between the creators' intentions, the methods employed, and the discernible impact.

Monographs

Meding, Holle Ameriga, "Nach Chile, um den Menschen zu helfen...". Die Anfänge der Colonia Dignidad (1961-1970), (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2019)

Articles

• Framing the Dictatorship: Uncovering Correlations of Archetypes in Chilean TV series using Digital History (2024, in press)

• together with Juan Pablo Sánchez Sepúlveda: Political Echoes: Historical fiction surrounding the Chilean dictatorship in the digital age (2024, in press)

• Colonia Dignidad entre historia pública y entretenimiento: Desde la guerra fría hasta la era del streaming, in: Anales de Literatura Chilena, no. 40, 2023

• together with Hannah Müssemann: “Volvimos a Los 80 sin querer“. Una serie de televisión como puente hacia el pasado chileno, in: Hispanorama, 182, November 2023 (im Druck)

• »Sauberkeit und Edelsinn« – Die Private Sociale Mission in Siegburg als Keimzelle der Colonia Dignidad, in: Stefan Rinke, Philipp Kandler, Dorothee Wein (Hg), Colonia Dignidad: Neue Debatten und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bd. 11047, 2023)

• »Sauberkeit und Edelsinn« – Die Private Sociale Mission in Siegburg als Keimzelle der Colonia Dignidad, in: Stefan Rinke, Philipp Kandler, Dorothee Wein (Hg), Colonia Dignidad: Neue Debatten und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2023)

• The Día de los Mártires - Spontaneos Demonstration, Heroic Myth, or Political Instrument? The 1964 Panamanian Flag Riots in the History of US-Panamanian Relations, in: Global Histories. A Student Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)