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Final EUscreen Conference Report

 

EUscreen organised its final conference on September 13 and 14, focusing on Television Heritage and the Web. We looked back on lessons learned, showcased the achievements of the project and looked at the road ahead. This conference report wraps up the conference topics and debates and was jointly edited by Brecht Declerq, Florian Delabie, Berber Hagedoorn, Yves Niederhäuser, Elke Poppe, Katja Šturm and Erwin Verbruggen. Presentations and video recordings of the conference will be made available over the next days at the conference overview page.

Television Heritage and the Web

The first EUscreen conference, held in 2010, focused on selecting and contextualising historical audiovisual media through links with existing sources on the web. The second conference, in 2011, focused on use and creativity in the audiovisual domain. This third conference revisited these topics and further developed related ideas, based on individual contributions in the field. It was the final conference in multiple ways, as Prof. Dr. Sonja de Leeuw, who led both EUscreen and its predecessing project Video Active, announced that she would step down as the project leader. A celebrated television scholar, she chaired most, if not all of the previous EUscreen conferences, and opened this Budapest conference with a warm welcome and remarks on the current status of television research and the role of the EUscreen project.

Keynote speaker prof. Lynn Spigel started off the conference with an outline of her upcoming book, which focuses on the visualisation of mass culture through personal archives. She researched the representation of television sets in mass-media (magazines, ads, etc.) and family snapshots. Advertisements and snapshot photographs represent very specific and individual ways of incorporating the television set as an everyday object. The images in family albums seem to document an inversion of the use of TV – instead of “watching TV”, the set becomes an accessory for personal performance instead. Throughout the ‘50 and ‘60s, people adopted televisions in many and unintended ways and used it to condense, stage and amplify the individual and the family life. On nowaday’s online platforms, snapshots of television sets with a personal, sentimental as well as a commercial value aggregate to become a shared popular culture that merges analogue nostalgia and digital culture.

Wilfried Runde leads an interdisciplinary R&D-Team with 14 people at Deutsche Welle that follows and analyses trends and major changes in the media world. One of these changes is the shift from linear TV consumption to ways of media consumption that don’t depend on timely or spatial constrictions. Social media clearly play a key role in this context. The main interest for the media production industry is in the take-over of breaking news by social media platforms such as Reddit), which are faster than mainstream media could ever be. Social media changed the attitude of media consumers in that they no longer are looking for news but assume that relevant news will find their way to them. The question now for media corporations is what they can learn from these changes. Runde sees one of the answers in data-driven-journalism and sees a form of “data-tainment” emerging. In the discussion it was pointed out that data-driven journalism has to approach data as critical as it approaches other sources for journalistic research. As long as the basic methods of critical journalism are kept in place, contemporary technology allows journalists to do their work faster, working with data collections as a new source.

To conclude, EUscreen’s ambitions are all but limited. The creation of an open platform for the European audiovisual heritage collections can hardly be called a walk in the park, but is a big step that connects broadcasters from different cultural and economical backgrounds all over Europe. Media creators and broadcaster’s archives are in the middle of a massive cultural and institutional shift, in which traditional restricted access is challenged and models for openness are explored. The EUscreen project provides these archives-in-transition a platform to share experiences and learn form each other what models for providing access, content and context may or may not work. The shared goal is to build and improve upon an environment that provides the best experience for those users wanting to explore the rich cultural treasure troves they each hold.

Presenting the Virtual Exhibitions

The last presentations of the first day of the conference discussed the virtual exhibitions that were recently published on the EUscreen portal. These online exhibitions aim at helping visitors find their way throughout the mass of materials and sources available on the portal and providing more stories and background info linking together its contents. During this latest round of presentations, we were presented with the future of the exhibition builder, a tool built specially to create and manage the exhibitions on EUscreen. A second point for discussion was the editorial work to put them online and their use as sources for television history researchers.

This last aspect was presented by Dr. Dana Mustata, from the University of Groningen. She began with the personal thought that she considered herself an analogue researcher in a digital world, wherein she realised that historical television items are often displaced and decontextualised when they are published online. Online archives have been pre-selected by archivists and are placed on websites with limited information or historical context. Dr. Mustata proposed methods and a historiography to be developed to use online sources. She first highlighted the phenomena, practices and processes of Europeanness and trans-nationality in television history, then explained how she prefers to present this kind of collaborative practices as visible agencies, so that it could help rediscovering neglected aspects of television history. Mustata concluded her presentation by stating that the scientific value of EUscreen could be increased with a collaborative platform through which experiences could be shared and could contribute to writing television history.

As dr. Sian Barber from Royal Holloway, University of London, presented, the editorial process to choose/select media to be published into the exhibitions follows the lines of such an intricate collaboration. The main purpose of the exhibitions is to give meaning to content through collaborative work between researchers, content providers and technological partners. Working together with these groups allows researchers to better understand the process of content selection, while content providers get the opportunity to show their archives in another way and to highlight new aspects of their collections. dr. Barber concluded with a presentation of the selection process that was used on some of the online exhibitions that have recently been released . Daniel Ockeloen from Noterik completed this presentation by showing the technical challenges of the exhibition builder, which has been custom-built within the project to create and manage exhibitions that include the various video sources and the descriptive information on EUscreen.

Workshop: Best-Practice Applications

The conference was closed by Hungarian curator Attila Nemes, who founded Kitchen Budapest, which is a new media lab that focuses on innovative research into fields as varied as mobile communication, digital storage and online content. His contribution focused on the use of digital media to improve people’s private lives, thereby including private materials and gathering information on how focus groups such as little children or the elderly go about using digital and moving image technologies and can use them to improve personal bonds, facilitate family communication and aid their daily dose of happiness.

Overall, the conference gave a healthy overview of the playing field in which EUscreen operates. It showed that the project has constructed both a technological platform – one that provides a place where unique content is gathered and contextualised for different groups of users – and a network of people from different backgrounds with a shared interest in providing access & context to historical audiovisual materials. In this double sense, EUscreen has a challenging task in a time where media outlets are rapidly changing and next steps to take in the years that lie ahead.

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