“Migrating to the Web” investigates how interactive practices produce and are influenced by a specific view over migration. The project analyses serious games, newsgames, text-adventures, interactive maps, and data visualization as “cultural artifacts”. It proposes to study these practices as material objects which by emphasizing innovation quickly risk disappearing, but also as elements in a larger media ecosystem. The work argues that these practices embed two specific humanitarian views, which mobilize technological affordances like interactivity to support an “ethic of empathy” and make use of data infrastructures and operational images to produce an imaginary of (incoming) emergency.

Nicole Braida is an independent film and media scholar and works as a Content specialist for IKON Digital Farm, curating immersive and interactive museum experiences. She obtained her PhD in 2021 at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz as a member of the research project “Configuration of Films” (2017-2020). In 2022, she published her dissertation Migrating through the Web. Interactive Practices about Migration, Flight and Exile for Transcript in Open Access. From 2021 to 2024, she worked as a Postdoc researcher in the Project Dici-Hub (Digital Cinema Hub) at the University of Mainz, where she investigated the data-driven histories of Super8. She has held several courses in Germany and Italy on Digital Methods and Interactive media. Among her most recent publications are From the Small Screen to the Big Screen: The Super8’s Distribution of Sandokan TV series In Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal (2025) and (with Frauke Pirk) Teaching Small Gauge with Digital Methods in Doing Digital Film History: Concepts, Tools, Practices (2025).

ni.braida@gmail.com