2023 | 24 | Re-bordering the Archive

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Archives, Mismatches, Hacks! Overcoming Archival Boundaries in Transnational Research
Strandgaard Jensen, Helle (2023) , S. 29-38
In this article, I use my experiences in writing about the transnational history of Sesame Street to point toward ways forward for researchers interested in investigating entangled European broadcasting histories. I will point to places where I found European interconnections in journals, committees, and festivals and consider what the availability of these published and unpublished sources has meant for my inquiries. I will also explain how I used a specific content-management software (Tropy) to ‘hack’ and go beyond the national boundaries encoded in the archival collections I used. Finally, I suggest that perhaps it is not audiovisual material broadcasting archives first and foremost need to make available in digital formats if we want to further boundary-crossing television history; instead, I believe that the possibility of sharing self-digitized printed material should be a particular focus in the future.
Audio on Paper: The Merits and Pitfalls of the Dutch Digital Media Archive for Studying Transnational Entanglements during the Second World War
Brolsma, Marjet; Kuitenbrouwer, Vincent (2023) , S. 39-53
This paper traces the transnational entanglements in the Dutch digital media archive, with a focus on the propaganda battle between pro-Nazi and pro-Allied Dutch media during the Second World War. Reflecting on newspaper and radio source materials in the CLARIAH Media Suite, it points out significant differences in the availability of these two source collections. It argues that these imbalances can be explained by the historical context in which these sources were created as well as by archival policies after 1945. The main problem lies in the digitized radio archive which contains only a relatively small amount of audio and leaves out the enormous amount of documents, such as transcripts and monitoring reports. With our article, we ask for more attention for this form of ‘audio on paper’, which has previously been overlooked by scholars and archivists. In the conclusion we argue for the digitization of these source materials and inclusion in the Media Suite as a first step towards redrawing the borders of media archives, enabling a new research agenda aimed at studying transnational entanglements in war time propaganda.
European Research After the Archival Turn: A Response to Sonja de Leeuw’s Article ‘The Archive as Network’
Hoogland, Grietje (2023) , S. 102-112
In 2012, Professor Sonja de Leeuw discussed how the Archival Turn will allow four developments to happen, among which was the possibility for research to cross national borders, allowing more transnational and European research. Now, roughly 10 years after the article was published, is a good moment to see how far on this journey we currently are. This article maps out these four developments with emphasis on the ‘European-ness’ of current research, to show the remaining bottlenecks such as language barriers, and funding and accessibility issues. A discussion with members of FIAT/IFTA held in 2021 will show how collaborative research can be one way to improve conditions for transnational research.
Introduction: Re-bordering the Archive: European Transnational Archives and Transnational Entanglements
Badenoch, Alec; Clark, Emily; Jancovic, Marek (2023) , S. 1-10
Two decades ago, the European Union began a major effort to digitize heritage and make it available through European-scale portals such as Europeana and EUscreen. These efforts were explicitly aimed at removing barriers - both the barriers of access to the archives as well as the national boundaries of heritage - to allow for new narratives of shared experience to develop. In this special issue we seek to reflect on how these changes have re-drawn the borders of audiovisual archives. Drawing on ideas of borders as complex assemblages, it seeks to understand how archival borders are shaped and transgressed by (socio)technical elements, legal and organizational elements, and cultural elements.
The Paradox of Borders: Tracing the Clip of Laika the Soviet Dog in Three Digital Television Archives
van der Deure, Mary-Joy; van Gorp, Jasmijn; Badenoch, Alec (2023) , S. 11-28
While television has never been fully obtained by national borders, the archives that preserve its heritage have long been positioned within nation-centred frameworks. Through wide-scale digitisation, combined with the internationalisation of our societies, more international users are finding their way to these archives, resulting in a transnational (re)circulation of the collections. This article therefore sets out to understand how transnational flows are visible and findable by tracing a clip of Laika the Soviet dog within three digital television archives: EUscreen, the Internet Archive and the CLARIAH Media Suite. It is shown that television archives should paradoxically emphasise the national borders in their collections in order to facilitate transnational television research. While national demarcations may be debated, defining them clearly will guide researchers between and over them.
Re-bordering UK Feminist Video in the 1980s. Cross-border Exchanges and Reflexivity in a Digital and Archive-based Project
Missero, Dalila (2023) , S. 70-86
This article discusses the benefits and limitations of the use of digital humanities tools in the context of transnational research in women’s film and television history, with a particular attention to issues of positionality, cross-border circulation, and exchange. To do so, it details on the methodology and results of a research project reconstructing the transnational impact of the collaborations between women producers and practitioners and UK broadcasters in the context of the UN Decade of Women (1975-1985). The investigation, funded by FIAT/IFTA (International Federation of Television Archives), analyses a group of programmes from the BFI archives by producing data-visualisations such as maps and network analysis generated through the collection of geographical, biographical, and chronological information. The goal of the study is offering a deeper understanding of transnationalism in the context of local television productions, while avoiding risks of fragmentation and methodological nationalism. However, while digital tools and data visualisations helped the identification of recurring tropes and transnational collaborations, the process of data collection and the visual aids themselves made evident the persistence of problematic geographies of knowledge and representation, that would require a broader assessment through collaborative, cross-national investigations.
Scholars’ Searching for Audio-Visual Information in Archives
Borlund, Pia; Liu, Ying-Hsang (2023) , S. 87-101
This paper contributes insights into scholars’ information searching in audio-visual archives, more specifically in relation to postcolonial research projects. The paper introduces the concept of information needs based on the framework by Ingwersen. Further, the paper addresses the scholars’ search strategies and the search challenges they experienced. Insights are obtained via in-depth interviews with six scholars. The scholars adapt collection-specific search strategies and make extensive use of keyword searching. The study demonstrates the complexity of searching archives for information and how demanding searching is with respect to requiring domain knowledge, artefactual literacy, and archival intelligence. Finally, the importance of access to the expertise of archivists is confirmed.
Unsettling Borders of Archives: Activating the Audiovisual Heritage of the Turkish Community in the Netherlands
Özgen, Asli (2023) , S. 54-69
This article explores issues with archival preservation and access in the case of the audiovisual heritage of migrant communities, which defies hegemonic categories of nation, race, ethnicity, language. As such, although these communities are somewhat present in archives, they are marginalised and remain absent, silent, and dormant. Through two case studies of audiovisual representations of Turkish migrants from Dutch public archives, the article tackles possible ways to unravel such hegemonic categories, thereby reflecting the multiplicities and instabilities of migrant archival objects. It explores the pivotal role of community engagement for more inclusive archival practices that undermine its constitutive limits –– to work with archives against the archives.

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