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CATCH Meeting Report: Supporting Media Studies Research

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CATCH Meeting Report: Supporting Media Studies Research

Report on the second CATCH Plus Spring Meeting "Supporting Media Studies Research: Exploration and Contextualization" by Julia Vytopil.

Storified by · Fri, Jun 29 2012 01:31:42

This spring, CATCH organised two open meetings: on Friday, May 11, SEALINCmedia convened around "Cultural Heritage Getting Social". The report of this meeting can be found here. The second meeting took place last week, on Friday, June 22. It was organised by the BRIDGE project, which Builds Rich Links To Enable Television History Research - hence the name. The BRIDGE research focuses on the complex information landscape in which television archives function. The main topic of the meeting was the contextual information that surrounds (audiovisual) archive objects, specifically focusing on how to store, share, and link such information to different types of content.

#catchmeeting @CATCHPlus presentation Patricia Alkhoven, project gave boost to heritage institutesRosemarie vdVeen-Oei
Several interesting speakers came forward this afternoon. Paul Doorenbosch introduced the CATCHPlus programme and gave a short status update. Patricia Alkhoven then announced the final conference that takes place on December 3 and 4. It will serve to present the results of the programme as well as the business model that was designed for the valorisation of research projects by heritage institutions.
#catchmeeting Presentation by Gene Golovchinsky @BeeldenGeluid Does history matter?Rosemarie vdVeen-Oei
Gene Golovchinsky works at the FX Palo Alto Laboratory as a senior research scientist. He is interested in the different possibilities for designing interactive search engines. In his presentation, he zoomed in on the history of search engines, beginning with the 1970 Dialog system, making an arch towards Querium, the system he recently developed. What makes this system special is that it supports an iterative searching process, by showing the user which documents s/he's already seen before. As we all know, searching is a process of trial and error: you search for something, cannot find it, tweak your query, encounter both the same results and new ones... By marking the documents that the user has visited before, Golovchinsky thinks he found a way to better serve the search needs of the user.
#catchmeeting Presentation of #Anne Helmond about web archiving and digital methods @BeeldenGeluidRosemarie vdVeen-Oei
Anne Helmond (@silvertje) on using Gephi (open-source interactive visualization & exploration platform) for #webarchiving analysisLotte Belice
Anne Helmond, researcher at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam, then presented her research titled “Web Archives and Digital Methods”. Her slides are available here and she posted her own report about the meeting on her blog.


Different methods can be used for archiving web pages. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive uses a biographical focal point, by gathering as many pages as possible in chronological order. A second method is archiving based on events: Web Sphere, for example, gathers web pages around specific themes or events. Finally, various national initiatives focus on web pages within the national domain.

Anne Helmond (@silvertje), CATCHPlus / BRIDGE meeting on #webarchiving. Great video about the Google home page http://youtu.be/nUrRz6Ejg-oLotte Belice
In a case study on the Dutch blogosphere, Anne used a tool built on top of the Internet Archive to research how the Internet Archive methodology can be used to study the development of blogging in the Netherlands.  This yielded a fine-grained and rich result. A report on Dutch blogging can be found in the journal First Monday.
#catchmeeting Presentation by #raymond Franz @TrendLight_NL about flaws of social media analysis @BeeldenGeluidRosemarie vdVeen-Oei

Raymond Franz from TrendLight closed this afternoon with an observation on the problems one encounters when analysing Social Media - as many firms use this technology to provide reputation management. The hype surrounding social media results in reputation managements statistics being regularly used and changed, with little regard for their shortcomings.

Thank you to Bouke Huurnink, Lotte Belice Baltussen and the CATCH meeting's Tweeters for your help on this story.