2012 | 1 | Making Sense of Digital Sources

This first issue of the Journal of European Television History and Culture follows up on the central theme of the first international EUscreen conference held in Rome in October 2010. The articles reunited in this first issue explicitly address the challenges of contextualising television material online and touch upon such a broad variety of questions as: the ontological status of digitised sources, analysing and interpreting them, how online access to audiovisual sources affects historical storytelling and whether the “archival turn” shapes a new historical consciousness for our European cultural heritage.

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  • Article
    History in the Backstage of Romanian Television Archives
    Mustata, Dana (2012-02-21)
    The historical value of audiovisual archives lies as much in the documented collection they have to offer as in the losses that history has imprinted on them. Controversial material that has been confiscated by the secret police in communist Romania or records of programmes that have been destroyed due to economizing practices of ‘taking the silver out of the pellicle’ are important facts in the history of Romanian television. Equally important for history is the ‘leftover’ material filmed during the Romanian revolution, which now lives in the shadow of the screened footage. Pursuing the life story of an archival institution and understanding its relations with history forms an important preliminary step for the historian in assessing the documented history within the archive.
  • Article
    Digitising Context: The Case of the Radio Times
    O'Dwyer, Andy (2012-02-21)
    The BBC is placing online their complete TV and radio schedule information going back to the formation of the BBC in 1922. For the very first time, the public, students and academics will be available to browse through detailed information on the BBC's broadcasting history. This has been made possible by a large scanning project of the BBC's programme guide magazine, the Radio Times. Over eighty years of programme information has been scanned, digitised and made ready for access via the Internet. It will be possible to search through years, months and days to see programme titles. There will also be descriptions about these programmes as reflected in the Radio Times and information on the contributors, performers, directors and producers.
  • Article
    Why Digitise Historical Television?
    Ellis, John (2012-02-21)
    Digitisation of historic TV material is driven by the widespread perception that archival material should be made available to diverse users. Yet digitisation alters the material, taking away any lingering sense of presence. Digitisation and online access, however, offer startling new possibilities. The article offers three: use of material in language teaching and learning; use in dementia therapy; and applications as data in medical research. All depend on ordinary TV for their effectivity.
  • Article
    European Television History Online: History and Challenges
    de Leeuw, Sonja (2012-02-21)
    Increasingly television heritage is being digitized and made accessible to non- industry user, enabling ‘the archival turn’: the study of online archives so as to revisit the dominant discourses in television historiography. This article discusses both conceptual and practical perspectives on online television heritage within a broader European frame- work. It starts from the notion of connectivity, pointing to the development of the archive as a network of connections and continues to address the dynamics involved in the trans- formation of the television archive into an online presentation including the most relevant actors. With the help of examples from Dutch and European television heritage projects the article discusses how the new archive is capable of mediating between the past and present, between history and memory, between curatorial perspectives and popular uses. It concludes on the challenges that (European) online television heritage offers in the field of television historiography and theory.
  • Article
    Retelling the Past with Broadcast Archives: Context Makes Sense
    Treleani, Matteo; Mussou, Claude (2012-02-21)
    The publication of audiovisual archives asks many questions about the meaning of documents. Publishing a video archive on a Web site, for example, is a re-contextualisation. The loss of cultural references needed to understand a document implies the necessity to recontextualise documents. This means adding elements, such as titles, descriptions and other information. This paper analyzes the case of a video published by Ina on its Web platform Ina.fr and its Blog, the Blognote. The video, dated 1st January 1947, is a report envisioning a future when surveillance cameras would be installed on the streets in Paris. These two instances of publication offer two different views on the editorialization of video archives.
  • Article
    Building Platforms for Historians: Making Data Findable: A Critical Reflection on Some German Initiatives
    Landes, Lilian (2012-02-21)
    Each discipline and subject traditionally has specific needs regarding digital work and research environments. Still, essential thematic complexes which are especially important in terms of the conception and establishment of scholarly platforms providing content in Open Access, can be named: Based on specific examples from the field of history in Germany, the article considers four categories: content selection policy, digitalisation, content genres and contextualisation. With the development of user requirements over the last 10 years, the challenges involved in the selection of provided content, the awareness of copyright issues or the linking and spreading of provided content are also changing.
  • Article
    If Content is King, Context is its Crown
    Snickars, Pelle (2012-02-21)
    The future of television—if former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has his way—will use computational modes to attract viewers, structure results, contextual queries and/or evolving viewing patterns within an emerging televisual datascape. Departing from Schmidt's recent MacTaggart lecture this article tries to track the coded consequences of TV as data, not the least from an audiovisual heritage perspective.
  • Article
    Translating ‘Liebeskummer’: Combo 1965
    Badenoch, Alexander (2012-02-21)
    This article explores the possibilities for using TV archive documents for constructing transnational European heritage environments online. It looks closely at one episode of the Dutch popular music programme Combo from the mid-1960s, where artists from inside and outside the Netherlands perform in front of dancing teenagers. It points in particular to the acts of translation that take place within the programme, and argues that such acts must also be key in constructing television heritage online.
  • Article
    Towards a New Digital Historicism? Doing History in the Age of Abundance
    Fickers, Andreas (2012-02-21)
    This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially of audiovisual sources – is comparable to the boom of critical source editions in the late 19th century. But while the dramatic rise of accessibility to and availability of sources in the 19th century went hand in hand with the development of new scholarly skills of source interpretation and was paralleled by the institutionalization of history as an academic profession, a similar trend of an emerging digital historicism today seems absent. This essay aims at reflecting on the challenges and chances that the discipline of history – and the field of television history in particular – is actually facing. It offers some thoughts and ideas on how the digitization of sources and their online availability affects the established practices of source criticism.
  • Article
    Making the Most of the Archive: Commercial Exploitation of the Digital Archive on Contemporary Italian Network TV
    Barra, Luca; Scaglioni, Massimo (2012-02-21)
    In the last 20 years, Italian television has discovered the richness and profitability of its enormous archives. Many new programmes have been broadcast on public and commercial television, making extensive use of historical fragments taken from previously aired shows. This essay explores the rationale behind the commercial re-use of TV archives in four different programmes: the “variety show made of variety shows” Da Da Da, the militant pastiche Blob, the commercial programming remix Super Show, the comedy history rewritten by La Super Storia. On the basis of these programmes, the consequences and risks of putting de-contextualized pieces taken from the past into the contemporary TV flow will be explored.
  • Article
    Editorial
    Fickers, Andreas; de Leeuw, Sonja (2012-03-07)
    We are very pleased to present the first issue of a new e-journal in the field of European media history: the Journal of European Television History. It is to be the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of television studies. The aim of this e-journal is to provide an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage.