Digital Media Archives

Un des grands enjeux pour les bibliothèques et archives numériques aujourd’hui est celui de permettre à tout usager une appropriation active de leurs fonds textuels et, plus particulièrement, audiovisuels. Appropriation active veut bien dire, adaptation des données audiovisuelles aux besoins et intérêts spécifiques d’un utilisateur ou d’un groupe d’utilisateurs. Une question particulièrement centrale dans ce contexte est celle du métalangage de description nécessaire pour permettre à toute personne de procéder à des analyses concrètes et personnelles d’un corpus de textes audiovisuels documentant l’univers du discours d’une archive audiovisuelle. Divisé en quatre grandes parties, ce livre explicite d’abord le cadre théorique et méthodologique de référence qui est celui de la sémiotique du texte audiovisuel. Dans les deux parties suivantes est décrit et expliqué d’une manière détaillée et concrète le travail de l’analyste d’un corpus audiovisuel à l’aide d’un métalangage de description développé dans le cadre d’un projet R&D financé par l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). Enfin, dans la quatrième partie sont décrits les différents éléments métalinguistiques qui composent le métalangage en question. Le contenu de ce livre peut être également consulté en ligne sur Google Books: https://books.google.fr/books?id=JNu2AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ViewAPI&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

In this article, television is reconsidered as a hybrid ‘repertoire’ of memory. It is demonstrated how
new dynamic production and scheduling practices in connection with highly accessible and participatory forms
of user engagement offer opportunities for television users to engage with the past, and how such practices
affect television as a practice of memory. The media platform Holland Doc is discussed as a principal case
study. By adopting and expanding Aleida Assmann’s model of the dynamics of cultural memory between
remembering and forgetting, a new model to study television as cultural memory is proposed which represents
the medium’s hybridity in the multi-platform era.

[note: bilingual edition pt+en] Bill Morrison is one of the most important experimental filmmakers in contemporary cinema. This text makes an introduction to his oeuvre signaling the key films and the key themes. Text edited in the catalogue of the 21st Curtas Vila do Conde - International Film Festival, which had an In Focus retrospective about the author.

Corrupted version of 'The Contingency of the Void: Archive as Hallucination', which was a text developed during research with the archives at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Exploring the speculative dimensionality, and component of (science) fictioning, that is present in the interpretation of archival materials, this essay employs Brian Eno's 1986 exhibition - 'Place #13' - at the Douglas Hyde Gallery as case-study in order to think through the problematics associated with archiving and documenting artworks that are fundamentally resistant to this process. The finalised text has been glitched by inserting remnants from the archive into the digital text document, resulting in the emergence of a partially mutilated form that oscillates between zones of meaning and unmeaning.

Presented as part of 'Old Invitations: A DHG Student Forum response to the DHG archive'. (http://www.douglashydegallery.com/events#/old-invitations)

Digital information storage provides a great opportunity for learning, as well as for preserving and organizing cultural materials. During the digitization processes (aiming at building heritage content), besides technical challenges, a number of questions and problems arise which are important for the archiving strategy. Tibor Mester shares his experiences in this regard, introducing knowledge gained from a project on collecting, archiving and presenting materials related to local cultural life in a middle-sized Hungarian town, and offers useful suggestions to those who conduct digital archiving.

ASA-SHS est un projet de recherche financé par l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). Il porte sur la conception et le développement expérimental d'un environnement de travail pour une analyse sémantique riche de corpus audiovisuels documentant la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales. Outre des outils d'analyse (de description et d'indexation), cet environnement intègre également une plateforme de publication en ligne de corpus audiovisuels préalablement, analysés et indexés.

Le rapport présente les grandes lignes du projet ASA-SHS: contenu, objectifs, résultats concrets visés, périmètres, organisation du travail et calendrier.

The archive poses a real problem from a semiotic point of view. The historical document refers to a context of production and reception that has been lost. Repurposed today, it has to do with a new encyclopaedia (Eco 1984), different form the one usually used to understand it. This constitutes what's usually called "intelligibility gap" (Bachimont 2009). The user of the archive probably has not the cultural referents of the past needed in order to interpret it. By analysing an example of a video repurposed on a web site, we will try to understand how to manage the relation between the present and the past. Managing an intelligibility question on the one side (how to give sense to a past document) and a philological one on the other (how to preserve an historical perspective on the past).

This is the result of a study, conducted together with Fabian Schmidt (Filmuniversität Babelsberg), on closed P2P 'film archives'. We have analysed the systems of three different BitTorrent-based communities and we reflect upon consequences on the notion of film archives in the realm of the digital as well as on the utopian potential of these new cinephiliac communities.

Management and preservation of digital assets begin at creation, and creation is further fortified with descriptions and details attached to it. Managing assets, in essence, means maintaining highest level of metadata for the content. Every clip on the server is an asset and potential revenue for the organization. However, asset without adequate metadata is lost. By definition, Metadata is information about resources. It allows resources to be identified, categorized, searched, retrieved, displayed, used, and re-purposed. This paper also explores how best international standards like Dublin Core / MARC 21 (for metadata standards), ANSI Z39.5 (for resource sharing and marketing -content sales & syndication), DDC / LCSH (for taxonomy, indexing and controlled vocabulary) can be used and implemented for media asset management in a digital domain.

Traditionally, broadcast archiving in Germany lies in the responsibility of the broadcasting institutions. As early as in the 1980s, serious public criticism emerged against this politically supported arrangement, focussing on the consequences of the domination of production orientation in the broadcasting archives:
the lack of public control, fragmentary collections and limited access opportunities for scientific and cultural purposes. In the digital age, the management of the broadcasting heritage has to deal with overarching issues in the assessment, preservation and use of archival assets, including the systematic collection of context material, the demand-based digital long-term preservation or legal restrictions for accessing archive material for scientific, educational and cultural work. Recently, there are signs of a rethinking process in public broadcasting to take their cultural mission seriously also with respect to their archives. However, the prospects of this process are connected with complex challenges.

Die Rundfunkarchivierung in Deutschland liegt traditionell in der Eigenverantwortung der Sender. Schon in den 1980er Jahren formierten sich Kritiker gegen diese medien- und kulturpolitisch gestützte Regelung und prangerten die Folgen der dominanten Produktionsorientierung in der Rundfunkarchivierung an: Fehlende öffentliche Kontrollmöglichkeiten, lückenhafte Bestände und eingeschränkte Zugriffsmöglichkeiten für wissenschaftliche und kulturelle Zwecke. Im digitalen Zeitalter hat die Verwaltung des Rundfunkerbes mit übergreifenden Problemen bei der Bewertung, Bewahrung und Benutzung von Überlieferungen zu kämpfen, u.a. bei der systematischen Erfassung von Kontextüberlieferungen, der bedarfsorientierten digitalen Langzeitarchivierung oder rechtlichen Einschränkungen bei der Zugänglichmachung von Archivalien für die Wissenschaft, Bildungs- und Kulturarbeit. Jüngst gibt es Anzeichen für ein Umdenken in den Rundfunkanstalten, ihren öffentlichen kulturellen Auftrag auch mit Blick auf den Zugang zu ihren Archivbeständen ernst zu nehmen. Dabei sind die Perspektiven mit komplexen Herausforderungen verbunden.

La Primera Guerra Mundial fue una guerra de imágenes. Su primer centenario ha propiciado varios proyectos de aproximación de las mismas a los ciudadanos del siglo XXI. Por su envergadura destaca EFG1914, iniciativa del portal European Film Gateway con la que se han digitalizado miles de documentos audiovisuales relacionados con la guerra. Para aproximarse a las más de setecientas horas de imágenes en movimiento, se ha partido de la exposición virtual que explora varios aspectos de la Gran Guerra, de cuyos films se han seleccionado los más significativos sobre las filmaciones en el campo de batalla, la propaganda, el antibelicismo, la innovación tecnológica y armamentística, así como el sufrimiento. El viaje propuesto no busca ser exhaustivo sino proporcionar una visión caleidoscópica de la producción bélica conservada, ampliamente desconocida, y representativa de las diferentes ideologías que las impulsaron.

Public service media (PSM) institutions such as Estonia’s Eesti Rahvusringhääling (ERR) are established to provide public service. The understandings of what kinds of public services these should be and how to provide them have changed over time. Over the course of the last two decades, the makers of media and cultural policies have often used the concept of “public value” to both give new purpose to PSM as well as assess their operational effectiveness and commitment to their purpose. In such contexts, however, the concept of public value has been defined in a limited way—as direct value to taxpayers. Yet, as proposed by Mark H. Moore, the original motivation for the “public value” concept was to outline a process in which what is valuable to the members of society is sorted out in the well- functioning public sphere, and then government offices and public institutions collaborate with other institutions, both public and private, to provide these services to the public. Mariana Mazzucato has complemented this idea with an argument that as public institutions work towards public value and collaborate with other institutions, they become market shapers, often driving the innovation ecosystems. In this way they provide “dynamic public value” by shaping the industry and broader markets and society. Several commentators have argued previously that PSM institutions perform this role in shaping the “media innovation systems” in terms of developing novel forms of content, talent, and industry relationships. Yet, in the era of datafication of media and culture, PSM institutions are increasingly realizing that their archives and databases constitute an important source of value to society. Their archives can be seen as assets that can be valorized by further development and analytics and then potentially published as open data to the general public. In this working paper, we discuss various ways in which PSM institutions in general, and Estonian public broadcaster ERR specifically, could produce public value in new ways—by driving cultural data related to innovation systems and by publishing open data. The latter could be seen as a new kind of publishing activity increasing the transparency of PSM operations.

The First World War was a war of images. Its first century
has given several projects to approach citizens of 21st century
to them. Because of its magnitude EFG1914 stands out,
an initiative by European Film Gateway to digitize audiovisual
documents related to the war. The virtual exhibition
has been the start point to be closer to over seven hundred
hours in moving pictures, which explore many aspects of
the Great War; from this huge group has been chosen the
most relevant films shot at the front, others with propaganda
purpose, anti-war concept, about technical innovation
and the suffering in the war. The proposed journey doesn´t
expect to be exhaustive but giving a caleidoscopic view of
the preserved war film production, thoroughly unknown,
and characteristic of the different ideologies that inspired
them.

Book review published in: In: H-Soz-Kult, 10.11.2014.

Book reviewed:
Behmer, Markus; Bernard, Birgit; Hasselbring,
Bettina (Hrsg.): Das Gedächtnis des Rundfunks. Die Archive der öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender und ihre Bedeutung für die Forschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2014. ISBN: 978-3-531-18319-0; 464 pp.

Short and long-term access to archival records is socially and culturally significant in digital environment. New licensing frameworks and austere policies can often make conditions for the re-use of material unmanageable for archival curators. Legal uncertainty and restrictive regulations may jeopardize the knowledge ecosystem by limiting access to information; a thorough analysis of this new environment has become increasingly imperative. The challenges faced in developing and implementing policies with appropriate levels of control and information management practices, are matters that must be examined, debated and determined by an array of stakeholders. Institutional and national settings differ significantly across the archival domain and so do the challenges and barriers that have emerged.. These processes are complex and besides advancement of technical expertise and investment in digitisation require serious rethinking of the role and place of archives and their relationships with citizens.

The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of information sharing in social media about missing persons by using social media data (mostly Twitter) and conventional media coverage (media archives),
adopting a platial perspective to this geographical information. By focusing on the cases of three people gone missing, we report on ways in which civil society establishes relational networks through social media to collectively support local searches and share information in rural Sweden. Geographical information systems and visualization techniques underlie the methodology of this study. Findings show that the geography of information sharing in social media about a missing person is not random, revealing a globally dispersed pattern across the country. Information sharing contains more emotional than informational content, hitting a peak of spread after a person is found deceased. This finding indicates that the value of information shared by social media as a problem-solving resource might have so far been overestimated in the process of finding missing persons. In addition, tweets show indications that voluntary organizations constitute a valuable resource in rural contexts but not without impact on the existing networks of stakeholders delivering emergency services.