2023 | 23 | Curation and Appropriation of Digital European Heritage

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  • Article
  • Article
    We Want Your Tools! Or Do We? On Digitized Cultural Heritage Archives And Commercial Content Identification Tools
    Eriksson, Maria (2023) , S. 96-107
    This article reflects on the technical gap that exists between academic and corporate capacities to study how digitized cultural heritage is reused online. In the context of tracing how audiovisual archival content is remixed and reinserted into new cultural contexts, the article asks what it would mean for humanistic researchers—and cultural heritage institutions more broadly—to utilize content identification tools provided by actors such as Google. How could commercial techniques for policing copyrights and tracing the whereabouts of online content be re-purposed to assist in research concerning remix practices and transformed cultural memories? What technical and legal consequences would such partnerships yield? And would such collaborations be ethical and scientifically defendable in the first place? Ultimately, the article reflects on the legal and technical discrepancies that exist between academic and commercial actors when it comes to monitoring how cultural content moves online. It also asks questions about what it means to care for digitized heritage collections in the 21st century.
  • Article
    The Noise of the News: Spectral Analysis of Early Swedish Television News 1958 – 1978.
    Malmstedt, Johan (2023) , S. 24-37
    Looking back on the very first year of television in Sweden, the head of programming Henrik Hahr celebrated having brought the world into “the living room of the viewer”. From the emergence of Swedish public service television in 1956 and onwards, the medium would be lauded as a window to the world. Yet, what noises came through this window? Shifting focus away from the visual content of television, this article explores and emphasizes the sonic dimensions of early Swedish news broadcasting. In the middle of the 20th century, the look, and the sound of the news were taking shape across television stations around the world. In Sweden, public service broadcasting was partly influenced by the backdrop of the cold war, and demands were formulated on a style of television that would be distinctive from the American and Soviet alternatives. This was a matter of images and audio in equal proportions. Deciding what kind of sound was added to the previously mute newsreels was at the heart of televised journalism. With a media monopoly running two competing news shows, the Swedish case offers insight into the establishment and differentiation of public service television aesthetics in the post-war era. Prior research has investigated the institutions, infrastructures, and ideas which shaped early Swedish television, but the very signals remain unexplored. This article introduces new methods for studying aural aesthetics in audiovisual media. By conducting various types of spectral visualization on recorded television news from 1958 until 1978, this analysis traces the sonic profile of the Swedish public service. The aim is to provide historical knowledge of how the news sounded and which aural experiences were promoted within the realm of the welfare state media monopoly. However, by drawing attention to the prospect of audio signal processing as a method for cultural-historical research, the purpose is also to make a methodological contribution to television studies at large.
  • Article
    Editorial
    Waysdorf, Abby; Müller, Eggo (2023) , S. 1-3
    This special issue of VIEW was inspired by a call from the final conference of the project “European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage” (CADEAH). The project brought together interdisciplinary expertise in the curation of digital audiovisual heritage, contemporary European history and Digital Humanities to study the ‘afterlife’ of digitized audiovisual heritage once it was made accessible and shared online, something that has seen a great deal of growth throughout the first two decades of this century. What happens to digitized audiovisual heritage once it is shared online? How does audiovisual heritage circulate online? To what extent do users re-use or re-mix audiovisual heritage? And, more specifically from an archival perspective: How do strategies of curation shape the appropriation of digitized heritage? What new perspectives on European history and identity do digital curations and appropriations of audiovisual heritage create? How can audiovisual archives better foster the re-use of Europe’s audiovisual heritage? With this issue we wanted to broaden our view and discuss our insights with scholars from diverse disciplines and with diverse professional backgrounds. These articles showcase the methodological and conceptual approaches that are being used across Europe to understand, and encourage, the use of audiovisual heritage, investigating contemporary practices of re-use and the ways that archives themselves think about these challenges.
  • Article
    Performatively Archiving the Early Web: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
    Bril, Marijn (2023) , S. 69-85
    The 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.
  • Article
    From Stock Shots to Ghost Data: Tracking Audiovisual Archives about the European Union
    Shen, Shiming; Treleani, Matteo; Compagno, Dario; Winckler, Marco (2023) , S. 4-23
    This 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).
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  • Article
    Make Film History: Opening Up the Archives to Emerging Filmmakers
    O’Sullivan, Shane; Chambers, Ciara; McAuliffe, Colm (2023) , S. 53-68
    This case study traces the evolution of the Make Film History project, an award-winning archival resource which gives emerging filmmakers and educators in the UK and Ireland access to 270 films for creative reuse on course-related projects. It explores the barriers to the creative reuse of audiovisual archive material in education; and how the project overcame these with the support of our project partners at the participating archives to create a new, sustainable model for creative reuse in a range of educational settings and in partnership with film festivals.
  • Article
    Audiovisual Heritage and its Uses at the Swiss Public Broadcaster: A Dialogue on Opportunities and Constraints for Archives and Academics
    Weber, Anne-Katrin; Comte, Simone; Vallotton, François (2023) , S. 38-52
    Conjointly conceived by an archivist at the Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS, the French speaking PSB) and two media historians, this paper aims at discussing the diversity of uses of digitised AV heritage in Switzerland through the lenses of their professional experience. It focuses on the RTS as a particularly productive case study since the RTS has not only been a pioneer in digitising AV heritage and in promoting its holdings to the broader audience, but it also actively develops new tools for internal use, in particular speech to text technologies and more recently AI-based automation for image treatment and analysis, and datamining tools. Through a discussion of current projects at the RTS, the paper provides insights into the most recent uses and reuses of digitised AV heritage in Switzerland.