Search

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.

Television is a public mediator of what constitutes ‘crises’ in Europe. Audio-visual archives and researchers are facing new complexities and ‘information bubbles’ when telling stories and reusing televised materials. I reflect on these practices, among others, via a comparative case analysis of the EUscreen portal offering access to thousands of items of European audio-visual heritage. I question how practices of selection and curation can support comparative interpretations of such representations. This approach aims to understand and support (1) interpretations of digitized/digital audio-visual sources in the era of information overload; (2) user interaction with digital search technologies – especially researchers as platform users; and (3) contextualization for reuse of audio-visual texts. Support for cultural memory research is crucial as television’s audio-visual heritage can help us to recognize which cultural practices result in the production of specific texts in European societies, representing conditions of the multiple crises that European citizens are experiencing today.

This article sheds light on how adults in Barcelona (ES), Groningen (NL), and Milan (IT) utilized WhatsApp to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interactions and to fight social isolation during the first 2 months of the COVID-19 lockdown. We argue that practices of WhatsApp usage have multiplied and diversified experiences of co-presence at distance and made group socialities even more important than before. Building on the concepts of “scalable socialities” and “polymedia,” the article formulates the concept of “scalable co-presence” to account for ways in which WhatsApp has enabled multiple experiences of proximity to others across different scales of sociality, from one-to-one to large groups interactions. In this article, we also argue that the concept of “scalable co-presence” is relevant to bring the study of mediated co-presence out of media and migration studies into the broader field of media and cultural studies. With reduction in mobility, increased social distancing, and ubiquitous connectivity, the role of communication technologies in mediating proximity at distance has become crucial for many more people around the world outside the context of transnational migration. The concept is also relevant to acknowledge the increased importance of mediated group interactions and communications in (post)-pandemic digital societies.

Over the last decade, academic research has increasingly explored the dynamics of memory in contemporary and converging media cultures. The aim of the edited volume The Past in Visual Culture: Essa...

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.

This article offers a first exploratory critique of digital tools' socio-technical affordances in terms of support for narrative creation by media researchers. More specifically, we reflect on narrative creation processes of research, writing and story composition by Media Studies and Humanities scholars, as well as media professionals, working with crossmedia and audio-visual sources, and the pivotal ways in which digital tools inform these processes of search and storytelling. Our study proposes to add to the existing body of user-centred Digital Humanities research by presenting the insights of a cross-disciplinary user study. This involves, broadly speaking, researchers studying audio-visual materials in a co-creative design process, set to fine-tune and further develop a digital tool (technically based on linked open data) that supports audio-visual research through exploratory search. This article focuses on how 89 researchers – in both academic and professional research settings – use digital search technologies in their daily work practices to discover and explore (crossmedia, digital) audio-visual archival sources, especially when studying mediated and historical events. We focus on three user types, (1) Media Studies researchers; (2) Humanities researchers that use digitized audio-visual materials as a source for research, and (3) media professionals who need to retrieve materials for audio-visual text productions, including journalists, television/image researchers, documentalists, documentary filmmakers, digital storytellers, and media innovation experts. Our study primarily provides insights into the search, retrieval and narrative creation practices of these user groups. A user study such as this which combines different qualitative methods (focus groups with co-creative design sessions, research diaries, questionnaires), first, affords fine-grained insights. Second, it demonstrates the relevance of closely considering practices and mechanisms conditioning narrative creation, including self-reflexive approaches. Third and finally, it informs conclusions about the role of digital tools in meaning-creation processes when working with audio-visual sources, and where interaction is pivotal.

Peter Forgacs' The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (1997), which (re-)constructs the history of the Jewish Peereboom family in 1933–1942, reveals how the found footage documentary can function as a s...

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.

Professionals in the television industry are working towards a certain future - rather than end - for the medium based on multi-platform storytelling, as well as multiple screens, distribution channels and streaming platforms. They do so rooted in institutional frameworks where traditional conceptualizations of television still persist. In this context, we reflect on the role of the national television archive as an agent of historical knowledge in the convergence era. Contextualisation and infrastructure function as important preconditions for users of archives to find their way through the enormous amounts of audio-visual material. Specifically, we consider the case of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, taking a critical stance towards the archive's practices of contextualisation and preservation of audio-visual footage in the convergence era. To do so, this article considers the impact of online circulation, contextualisation and preservation of audio-visual materials in relation to, first, how media policy complicates the re-use of material, and second, the archive's use by television professionals and media researchers. This article reflects on the possibilities for and benefits of systematic archiving, developments in web archiving, and accessibility of production and contextual documentation of public broadcasters in the Netherlands. We do so based on an analysis of internal documentation, best practices of archive-based history programmes and their related cross-media practices, as well as media policy documentation. We consider how audio-visual archives should deal with the shift towards multi-platform productions, and argue for both a more systematic archiving of production and contextual documentation in the Netherlands, and for media researchers who draw upon archival resources to show a greater awareness of an archive's history. In the digital age, even more people are part of the archive's processes of selection and aggregation, affecting how the past is preserved through audio-visual images. (author's abstract)

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: Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree & Jay Winter (eds). Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe. Amsterdam (Amsterdam University Press) 2010, 368 p., ill., ISBN 978 90 8964 205 9

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

Onder found footage wordt in brede zin verstaan: ieder gebruik van eerdergemaakt materiaal. Hierbij kan gedacht worden aan eerder opgenomen film-, video-, foto- en/of audio materiaal, bijvoorbeeld amateurfilmpjes, familiefoto’s, archiefbeelden en outtakes. In een found footage documentaire wordt dergelijk ‘gevonden’ materiaal door een andere filmmaker op een nieuwe wijze gebruikt.

A European Television History