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Our CLARIAH research pilot ‘Narrativizing Disruption’ (NarDis) investigates how (digital) humanities researchers who use audio-visual materials in their research practices can benefit from digital tools that help them better understand how media representations construct meaning. This research pilot uses a case study approach to delve deeper into the relationship between scholarly search and storytelling – by concentrating on how, specifically, the Media Suite’s exploratory search tools can help to understand how ‘disruptive’ media events are constructed as narratives across media, and instilled with specific cultural-political meanings. This article presents the methodological insights of the research pilot, in order to explain how the existing features and functionalities of the Media Suite – specifically, its exploratory search tools – support such explorations. We discuss the challenges that we encountered during our research pilot, and identify a number of opportunities and recommendations for further Media Suite development.

It is our great pleasure to present this special issue of VIEW Journal of European Television and Culture in honour of Sonja de Leeuw, one of the founding members of the journal. The issue brings together articles that honour Sonja’s inspiring contributions to television history and television historiography.

Collective Cultural Memory as a TV Guide: “Living” History and Nostalgia on the Digital Television Platform Berber Hagedoorn University of Groningen (NL) E-mail: b.hagedoorn@rug.nlAbstract: Modern audiences engage with representations of the past in a particular way via the medium of television, negotiating a shared understanding of the past. This is evidenced by the increasing popularity of reboots, newly developed history and documentary programming, re-use of archival footage and nostalgia content. This article takes a closer look at television’s abilities to circulate and contextualize the past in the current era of convergence through narrowcasting or niche programming on digital television platforms, specifically via nostalgia programming. Such platforms exemplify the multifaceted way of looking at and gaining access to television programming through a variety of connected platforms and screens in the current multi-platform era. Since the way in which television professionals (producers, schedulers, commissioners, researchers) act as moderators in this process needs to be further analysed, the article places an emphasis on how meaningful connections via previously broadcast history and nostalgia programming are also curated, principally through scheduling and production practices for niche programming – key elements in television’s creative process that have received less academic attention. Furthermore, the article discusses to what extent media policy in the Netherlands is attuned to the (re-)circulation of previously broadcast content and programming about past events, and reflects on television’s possibilities for “re-screening” references to the past in the contemporary media landscape. The analysis is based on a combination of textual analysis of audio-visual archival content and a production studies approach of interviews with key professionals, to gain insight into the creators’ strategies in relation to nostalgia programming and scheduling. Subsequently, the article demonstrates how national collective memory, as understood by television professionals in the Netherlands, informs the scheduling and circulation of “living history” on the digital thematic channel – collective cultural memory hence functioning as a TV guide.Keywords: representing and re-screening the past, audio-visual and archival materials, multi-platform television, nostalgia programming and thematic scheduling, cultural memory.

Television is a significant mediator of past and historical events in modern media systems. In this paper, I present results from my dissertation Doing History, Creating Memory: Representing the Past in Documentary and Archive-Based Television Programmes within a Multi-Platform Landscape (defended in January 2016), in which I have studied practices of representing the past on Dutch television as a multi-platform phenomenon. Dynamic screen practices such as broadcasting, cross-media platforms, digital thematic channels and online television archives provide access to a wide range of audio-visual materials. By exploring how television's convergence with new media technologies has affected its role as a mediator of the past, this study reflects on how contemporary representations of history contribute to the construction of cultural memory. Specifically, the poetics of doing history in archive-based and documentary programming are analysed from 2000 onwards, when television professionals in the Netherlands seized the opportunity to experiment with storytelling practices made possible by the increased digitisation of archival collections and the presence of online and digital platforms. This study is founded on a textual analysis of audio-visual cases to reveal processes of meaning making, and a production studies approach to gain insight into creators' strategies of broadcasting and multi-platform storytelling in relation to historical events. In this context, theoretical work from the areas of cultural studies, memory studies, narratology, media theory and (television) historiography has also been collected and critically interpreted, to address history and memory as processes of discursive struggle. Such an approach reveals distinct textual, cultural-historical and institutional aims, strategies and conventions for doing history on television, bringing power relations to the surface. In this paper, I will pay specific attention to the case of the long-running Dutch archive-based history programme Andere Tijden [Different Times, VPRO/NPS/NTR, 2000-present), in which the re-use of archival footage in relation to topical events, as well as a cross-media approach, play a prominent role in the audio-visual representation of events from the past by television programme makers. This study demonstrates, first, how the selection and circulation of historical narratives and audio-visual archive materials in new contexts of television works in relation to processes of mediation, hybridity and curation, and second, how such practices help to search, preserve and perform individual and collective cultural memories. Televised histories connect viewers/users with the past and provide necessary contextual frameworks through cross-media and transmedia storytelling, demonstrating the continuing importance of stories and memories produced through televisual practices – challenging accepted versions of history. Furthermore, this paper presents suggestions for follow-up research, based on a recent pilot study. In this follow-up study, I situate my interest in audio-visual representations of the past in a wider European and comparative context, to interrogate how past and historical events are represented through audio-visual materials in different political, economic, cultural and ideological national contexts in Europe. To do so, I have developed a comparative research model to study specific cases of audio-visual representations of the past in different countries in Europe, organized around a set of common questions, themes, and methodological reflections.

The medium television has been accused of being amnesiac or a producer of forgetfulness. However, researchers have discovered the many ways the mass media, including television, transform memories and affect not only the way societies remember, but also the way memories must be studied and conceptualized. Collective memories are often seen as institutionalized memories, which we can analyse through official manifestations such as ceremonies, monuments, or even major television programmes.While the texts presented in this issue do not deal with the theory of collective memory, they will suggest various ways of conceptualizing memories, not at the stable, “hard” level of institutions, museums, monuments, but rather at the level of more dynamic memory practices that take place in the contemporary media landscape as an ongoing, active and performative engagement with the past.

Review of: Jonathan Bignell & Andreas Fickers (eds). A European Television History. Malden, MA (Wiley-Blackwell) 2008, 288 p., ISBN 978 1 4051 6340 8