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Beyond Search
Full text linkThis research delves into the realm of digital audiovisual (AV) archives, focusing on user experience and advocating for the integration of exploratory approaches alongside conventional search.
Within cultural heritage institutions, conventional keyword-based search interfaces have long served as the primary means to access digital AV archives. However, these interfaces often fall short in addressing the diverse needs of users and serving more exploratory or open-ended queries.
Drawing on a series of illustrative case studies, this report showcases innovative practices in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, it looks beyond archives to seek inspiration from practitioners in other disciplines, such as artists, filmmakers, and community initiatives grappling with similar questions.
The research report identifies four core themes: Generous + Fluid Interfaces; Situated + Experiential Entry Points; Computational Sensing + Algorithmic Metadata; and Participatory Sense-Making + Storytelling. Each theme offers distinct benefits in terms of user engagement, accessibility, contextualization, and storytelling. Challenges of complexity, accessibility, and compatibility are also discussed.
This research endeavors to redefine the potential of the interaction paradigm and offer a rich set of pathways, where digital AV archives transcend conventional search methods to offer immersive, dynamic, user-centric experiences. By integrating exploratory interfaces, cultural heritage institutions can unlock the full potential of their collections, making them more engaging and accessible to a broader audience
Collaboratively Moving Forward
No full textThe immersive media collections of cultural heritage institutions are expanding. Institutions see the cultural significance of collecting immersive works and look at how these immersive works can fit in their existing collection policies and selection criteria. Once the immersive works have entered the collection, the preservation of immersive media starts. Institutions collaborate with artists to gather as much information as possible in the, sometimes limited, time available based on workflows for software-based art. While the risks of immersive media becoming obsolete are amplified, the preservation of these works brings challenges. Institutions try to apply, yet again, existing preservation strategies to preserve the immersive works based on their institutional goals. Since technology is rapidly changing and multiple different technologies fall under the umbrella term immersive media, the preservation strategies for immersive media are often bespoke. Collaboration between institutions with
similar preservation goals is recommended to create common guidelines for the preservation of immersive media
COLLECT*MAKE*SHARE #1
No full textCOLLECT*MAKE*SHARE biedt ruimte aan makers om zich te laten inspireren door archiefmateriaal en dit door experimenten met grafische technieken eigen te maken. Het werkproces van elke maker wordt vastgelegd in een zine, bestaande uit visuele essays, schetsen en reflecties op het collectiemateriaal van Beeld & Geluid. Zo geven de zines een inkijk in beeldend onderzoek met archiefmateriaal als vertrekpunt
Transformation of Bulgarian 1990s Print Media Cultures: Technology, Cultural Representations, Piracy, and Identity Formation on a Crossroad between the East and the West
No full textThe article investigates the transformation of Bulgaria’s print media culture in the 1990s, a period of profound political, economic, social, and cultural change in Eastern Europe. The paper’s contribution is two-fold. Firstly, it focuses on the convergence of selected Bulgarian newspapers with established and emerging media formats alongside Bulgaria’s position between the East and the West. Secondly, the representations of and discourses about technology during the transition period are analysed and their link with identity formation is explored. I compare two tabloids (Trud and 24 Chassa) with two business-focused broadsheets (Cash and Capital) issued in 1997. Adopting a non-Western perspective by focusing on a case of transitional Eastern Europe, the article offers a snapshot and a reflection on the cultural representations of technologies, discursive identity construction, and media practices of the 1990s. The emergence of the free market and the influx of electronics in Bulgaria affected identity formation as technologies related to notions of modernity, Europeanness, globalisation, entertainment, power, gender, and social status
Re-bordering the Archive: European Transnational Archives and Transnational Entanglements
No full textTwo decades ago, the European Union began a major effort to digitize heritage and make it available through European-scale portals such as Europeana and EUscreen. These efforts were explicitly aimed at removing barriers - both the barriers of access to the archives as well as the national boundaries of heritage - to allow for new narratives of shared experience to develop. In this special issue we seek to reflect on how these changes have re-drawn the borders of audiovisual archives. Drawing on ideas of borders as complex assemblages, it seeks to understand how archival borders are shaped and transgressed by (socio)technical elements, legal and organizational elements, and cultural elements
Performatively Archiving the Early Web: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
No full textThe abrupt closing of the web hosting service GeoCities – one of the most popular websites inhabited by users in the 90s – is a well-known example of the importance of web archiving for saving digital cultural heritage. GeoCities’ shutdown is a warning for today’s social media user-generated content that might suffer the same fate. Various web archiving organisations archived and nowadays present GeoCities pages. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied engage with GeoCities’ legacy in their project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2010–ongoing). This paper expands on the archival strategies of the artists and places their practice in the context of web archiving organisations – specifically Archive Team, the Internet Archive, and Restorativland – to understand how an artistic position may open up other ways of engaging with digital cultural heritage. This paper considers the archival practices of the organisations, artists, and users as a network of care, enabling different forms of remembrance. Whereas the archiving organisations preserve and present GeoCities statically, Lialina and Espenschied take a performative archival approach, in which they re-perform the dataset with old and new users. Through circulation and narration, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age builds on the memories of the artists and users and aims to give the GeoCities heritage back to users. The project invites users to interpret and make meaning of GeoCities and embraces the fluidity of digital culture, whilst embodying the future archival insecurity of commercial platforms
From Stock Shots to Ghost Data: Tracking Audiovisual Archives about the European Union
No full textThis paper deals with a major challenge linked to the collection of audiovisual documents within television and web archives. Looking for repeated sequences within a corpus of thousands of videos, we faced the fact that the footage we were looking for reveals itself to be reachable only as ghost data. In fact, any audiovisual sequence reused within different contexts exists conceptually as the repetition of one single visual unit, but from the point of view of the metadata tagging its occurrences, each item is a distinct document. Like a ghost, the shot is there, scattered among different places, but the metadata cannot point us to the visual form repeated, despite its evidence to the human viewer. When facing large amounts of data, to relate a visual unit to its occurrences, data analysis techniques are needed. We describe our procedures of collection and annotation, and the solutions combining qualitive work and a computer-aided approach to face this main challenge, within the research project Crossing Borders Archives (CROBORA)
European Research After the Archival Turn: A Response to Sonja de Leeuw’s Article ‘The Archive as Network’
No full textIn 2012, Professor Sonja de Leeuw discussed how the Archival Turn will allow four developments to happen, among which was the possibility for research to cross national borders, allowing more transnational and European research. Now, roughly 10 years after the article was published, is a good moment to see how far on this journey we currently are. This article maps out these four developments with emphasis on the ‘European-ness’ of current research, to show the remaining bottlenecks such as language barriers, and funding and accessibility issues. A discussion with members of FIAT/IFTA held in 2021 will show how collaborative research can be one way to improve conditions for transnational research
Re-bordering UK Feminist Video in the 1980s. Cross-border Exchanges and Reflexivity in a Digital and Archive-based Project
No full textThis article discusses the benefits and limitations of the use of digital humanities tools in the context of transnational research in women’s film and television history, with a particular attention to issues of positionality, cross-border circulation, and exchange. To do so, it details on the methodology and results of a research project reconstructing the transnational impact of the collaborations between women producers and practitioners and UK broadcasters in the context of the UN Decade of Women (1975-1985). The investigation, funded by FIAT/IFTA (International Federation of Television Archives), analyses a group of programmes from the BFI archives by producing data-visualisations such as maps and network analysis generated through the collection of geographical, biographical, and chronological information. The goal of the study is offering a deeper understanding of transnationalism in the context of local television productions, while avoiding risks of fragmentation and methodological nationalism. However, while digital tools and data visualisations helped the identification of recurring tropes and transnational collaborations, the process of data collection and the visual aids themselves made evident the persistence of problematic geographies of knowledge and representation, that would require a broader assessment through collaborative, cross-national investigations
Retrospective Technological Mythmaking: Media Discourses of Furby and Artificial Intelligence
No full textRecent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses at the time and provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to Furby. However, recent media discourses suggest Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology, similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands