Narrative Override
German Migration and Colonial Structures
in Southern Brazil
Lily Heinritz
& Lucas Terburg
About
The project “Narrative Override: German Migration and Colonial Structures in Southern Brazil” collects and presents various historical sources on German emigration to southern Brazil in the 19th century. The aim is to make different perspectives on this migration accessible and to reveal how the history of settlement has been narrated.
Across the sources, stains spread according to an automated system that reacts to the properties of each visible source. They symbolize migration, displacement, the incompleteness of information, and its simultaneous visibility.
Design Rules
- Stains/labels are flexible
- Colors: yellow, green, blue, brown
- Images and texts overlap
- One PDF page per page
- Source limitation to 50 pages
Technology
The project was developed in Visual Studio Code.
- The technical implementation is based on a quantitative analysis of the sources.
- Qualitative evaluation was discarded as too time-consuming.
- All sources were recorded in a table, assigned parameters, and structured as JSON.
- Automatic assignment of content to four layout types: letters, essays, websites, and video frames.
- The code generates a random order of content and a maximum page count per source: instead of a linear chronology, a fragmented structure emerges, reflecting real research processes.
- Defined parameters influence the number and intensity of the stains.