Dana Mustata (RUG) and Berber Hagedoorn (UU) recently carried out the second trials for use case scenarios in the research domain  at the Centre for Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The aim of these testing activities was to monitor the benefit of all enhancements and changes that have taken place in the development cycle of the EUscreen and test the usability of the portal for researchers.

The testing with media researchers at the University of Groningen (RUG) consisted of a focus group and was carried out in the form of an ‘acceptance test’ of the portal. Users present at the meeting came from different research areas: television history, journalism and online practices of journalism, amateur filmmaking and media technologies. Discussions during the meeting concerned the use of EUscreen content in research, the contextualization of EUscreen content, the different functionalities offered by the portal as well as feedback on two scenarios drafted by Utrecht University and the National Library of Sweden on the use of EUscreen material in research practices.

The meeting in Groningen was part of a series of testing activities carried out by different EUscreen partners across different countries and for all EUscreen target user groups. The testing results of this focus group meeting, together with testing in other user group sectors will be part of deliverable D6.3 Evaluation and will be compiled by the EUscreen partner KB, the National Library of Sweden.

EUscreen released a new public deliverable this week, titled Report on semantic interoperability with Europeana.

The deliverable illustrates the technical platform created to support interoperability. It describes the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which is the chosen technology for exporting metadata items to Europeana. OAI-PMH is a low-barrier and widely used mechanism for repository interoperability. In the context of the EUscreen project, OAI-PMH provides a mechanism for interoperability between the Ingestion Tool and various other modules or platforms.

It also presents the mapping between EUscreen elements, which have been modeled on the EBUcore metadata standard, and the so-called ‘Europeana Semantic Elements’ standard maintained by Europeana. The document was written by Vassilis Tzouvaras, Kostas Pardalis, Marco Rendina and Johan Oomen.

Download the deliverable at: http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/864473/c2aff7f4-2ad4-4793-aa85-8cd3b31d93a7

The EUscreen collection includes thousands of items. To help users get the most from the EUscreen material, researchers, experts and members of its partner broadcasters and audiovisual archives have created a series of online exhibitions. These exhibitions cover historical events, political debates and everyday life in Europe.

The current release, visible at http://www.euscreen.eu/exhibitions.html, brings online 10 different exhibitions, some of which are divided into subchapters or strands. The exhibitions are created by archivists, researchers, and enthusiasts.

These inter-archival exhibitions add new meaning to a wonderful collection of unique television materials and make them accessible to a different and larger audience; soon, visitors will be able to create their own stories and add more connections between the richness of 60 years of television history in Europe. Expert knowledge and a fascinating range of materials combine to offer exciting exhibitions on a wide range of subjects. A fine example of such an exhibition is the exhibition Being European, which brings together source materials from providers across the continent and is divided in multiple strands that showcase what European culture and identity may signify.

The tools designed for these exhibitions allow for the insertion of multimedia materials from all the project’s content providers and link back to the original items on the site, where users can find out more about them, share the links or get in touch with the providers themselves. Many more exhibitions will become available over the next couple of months and EUscreen is working hard to get the tools ready for everyone to start creating their own exhibitions.

Links

• Explore the exhibitions at http://www.euscreen.eu/exhibitions.html
• For images and logo materials, visit https://minus.com/mojCJC8YC
• Find the Press Release on Pressdoc

Television for Women: An International Conference: Call for Papers
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 15th-17th May 2013
Keynote Speakers: Charlotte Brunsdon, Christine Geraghty, Kathleen Karlyn and Lynn Spigel

At the culmination of the AHRC-funded project, A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-89, the project team (Dr. Mary Irwin, Dr. Rachel Moseley and Dr. Helen Wheatley (Warwick), and Hazel Collie and Dr. Helen Wood (De Montfort)) are organising a three day conference which seeks to open up and internationalise debate about the past, present and future of television programming for women.

Whilst television has traditionally been identified as a ‘feminised’ medium, because it is apparently ‘domestic, passive and generally oriented to consumption, rather than production’ (D’Acci, 2004), there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of the relationship between television and women. The team is therefore interested in hearing from scholars about television programming made for and watched by women viewers throughout the history of broadcasting and in the contemporary period, and would welcome both other researchers writing about the UK and those offering comparative work overseas.

Whilst the project has worked to fill in some of the some of the gaps in the history of women’s television, outlining significant moments in their research period, specific programme types, genres and scheduling slots which have become significantly marked as feminine, they know that there are many more gaps to fill, and hope that this conference will be a further step towards this.

Potential topics

• Rethinking broadcasting histories: where have women’s programmes and viewing practices been left out?
• National histories of programming for women. Is ‘TV for Women’ a global phenomenon?
• Female audiences: speaking to them, mapping their tastes and interests.
• Institutional/production perspectives on addressing the female viewer: how have broadcasters envisaged ‘what women want’?
• Questions of gender and genre.
• Representation of women and women’s concerns and cultural competences on television (as addressed to the female viewer).
• Feminist (and post-feminist) address and representation on television.
• Significant programme makers/teams/production companies in the production of television for women: is TV for women TV by women?
• Channels for women in the multichannel age: Lifestyle, Living, etc.
• Archiving issues that relate to women’s TV culture.
• Analyses of magazines and TV ephemera (listings guides, women’s magazines, promotional materials, etc.) and their address to the female viewer.
• Other media, other screens: histories of women’s radio, the female viewer and social media, women viewers on multimedia viewing platforms, which consider their connection to television etc.
• Understanding female TV fandom.
• The question of generation: how do women remember and relate to television differently at different life stages.

Participate

Abstracts of c.250 should be sent to Helen.Wheatley@warwick.ac.uk by 12th October 2012. Pre-constituted panels of three speakers may also be submitted, and should include a brief panel rationale statement, as well as individual abstracts.

From April to June 2012, second year student Tjerk Smit from the Communication Media and Design course in Amsterdam performed his internship at the Research & Devopment department of  Sound and Vision. During those ten weeks he explored new ways for visualising the data of the items from the EUscreen collection. In this blog post he tells us a bit more about that visualisation. EUscreen keeps an overview of the projects we’ve done with visualising the collection at our demo page. 

You can see Tjerks data visualisation at http://demo.euscreen.eu/datavisualisation/. Any feedback, hints of praise or tips for further improvement are highly welcome. If you’re a developer and reading this, you’re invited to make use of our linked open data capabilities to give visualising EUscreen a spin. 

As I am a beginner at computer programming, I was looking for a less complicated way to visualise the data  - without the need to do great amounts of coding. I discovered a great javascript library named d3.js. This library  is specialized for manipulating “data-driven documents” – documents based on data. It brings data to life with the help of standard web technologies such as HTML, SVG and CSS. Because D3 is based on these web standards,  it can use the full capabilities of modern browsers,without the need to use a proprietary framework.

With the help of this library, I was able to create a broad range of visualisations. You can find many great examples on the d3.js website. Most of those examples use datasets that are based on a hierarchical structure. The data on EUscreen is not hierarchical, so I needed to find a other kind of way to visualise it and came upon the parallel diagram. A parallel diagram is used to visualise multidimensional categorical data. It can be summed up in a so called cross-tabulation. With this diagram you can explore and analyse the data in an interactive way.

How it works

The data is loaded through a comma-separated values (CSV) file. The first line of the CSV contains all the column names: all the different dimensions you can filter on. Below you can see an (simplified) example of such a CSV file. Every item on EUscreen is one row in the document, which contains 20083 lines. Minus the first line with the column names that makes a total of 20082 items that are loaded and visualised: The entire EUscreen collection in April 2012.

With the diagram I created, you can change the dimensions (column names) you want to compare. If you click on a filter, a menu will expand. Doing so will add an extra dimension to the diagram. Within the filters you can toggle different options (categories). A horizontal bar is shown for each of its possible categories. The width of the bar denotes the absolute number of matches fort hat category. Every category in the first dimension is connected to a number of categories in the next dimenions, showing how that category is subdivided. Within the graph you can drag the dimensions and categories to reorder them. If you hover over the dimension names you will see 2 links: alpha and size. With alpha you can sort the categories on alphabetical order. With size you can sort the categories on size.

Improvements

The demo that I made is not perfect and improvements could be made. The data is not directly loaded from the EUscreen website, so the dataset is not dynamic. If there are added items on EUscreen, they’re not directly added to the CSV file. Another thing is that the data is not loaded into memory, so with every filter you make the whole CSV is loaded again. This means that the 4.5mb CSV has to be downloaded, which takes quite some time. A final improvement would be to create the menu for the filters dynamically. Those are static and therefore manually written. An improvement would be that they’re created by reading the first line of the CSV file (the column names) and that all the options (categories) within the filters are created by reading the input of all the items that are in the CSV file.

Visit the EUscreen data visualisation at: http://demo.euscreen.eu/datavisualisation/

Call for papers for Comunicazioni sociali, I, 2013

The Commercialization of Television Systems in Europe and its Consequences

Monographic issue. Accepted languages: English, Italian, and French
Issue Co-editors: Massimo Scaglioni, Luca Barra (Università Cattolica di Milano)

One of the most compelling and current challenges for television studies is to work on the edge of national and international boundaries. Such work must attempt to scrutinize the  historical evolutions of the different television national systems in the light of broader, supranational trends (Bignell-Fickers 2008; Bourdon 2011).

Following a comparative approach, and in order to better understand the developments of European television, the focus on commercialization is without any doubt productive: the entry of private and adbased players in TV national markets is a major phenomenon that has affected European broadcasting systems at different times and speeds, with complex consequences. Starting from the strong tradition of public service broadcasting and, in many cases, of monopoly, European television has experienced the birth of commercial TV at different points of its history, from the first experiments in the UK during the Fifties until the articulated – and often contradictory – process of deregulation and “liberalization” that occurred in many continental countries from the Seventies, as well – in Eastern Europe – along the Nineties.

This special issue of Comunicazioni sociali will analyze the gradual diffusion of several models of commercial TV throughout the decades into different nations across Europe. It aims to provide readers with an outline of the implications of commercialization at the social, cultural, institutional, political, textual and technological level, through case studies of individual nations or regions, comparative studies or theoretical analyses.

Call for Papers

Abstracts are invited for contributions to a special issue that will seek to further our understanding of the historical dynamics of TV commercialization that have differently shaped broadcasting systems in various European contexts: similarities and differences will emerge, contributing to a deeper comprehension both of European television histories and of the historical logics and developments of the medium. These can include:

• Early commercial broadcasting in Europe, both as lasting or “experimental” experiences;
• Definitions and implications of TV commercialization;
• Consequences of TV commercialization on a social and cultural level;
• Consequences of TV commercialization on a political and economical level;
• TV commercialization and changes in the logics of broadcasting;
• TV commercialization and production practices;
• TV commercialization and scheduling practices;
• TV commercialization and genre (re)definitions;
• TV commercialization and textual evolutions;
• TV commercialization and its consequences on the broader media system;
• TV commercialization and consumption practices;
• TV commercialization and changes in audience conceptualization;
• Theoretical approaches on TV commercialization;
• Original research findings on single case histories and nations.

Paper proposals (250-300 words, in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by October 31th, 2012.

Submissions should be sent to both the editors, Massimo Scaglioni (massimo.scaglioni@unicatt.it) and Luca Barra (luca.barra@unicatt.it). Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than November 15th, 2012.

Accepted articles (3500-5000 words, in English, French or Italian) will be due on January 31th, 2013, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review. The issue of Comunicazioni sociali will be published in April/May 2013.

About Comunicazioni sociali

Founded in 1973, Comunicazioni sociali is a journal that features both monographic and miscellaneous issues, dealing with critical questions pertaining to studies of the performing arts, film, radio, television, journalism, advertising and new media. Founded on an interdisciplinary approach, the journal has since its inception promoted rigorous debates on media content, representation and
consumption in terms of theory, history and critical analysis. The journal has enhanced exchanges with academic institutions, research centres, European networks and prominent scholars, by hosting both theoretical elaborations as well as empirical findings. Since 2009, the journal has adopted the double-blind peer review system and enhanced the international profile of its editorial board, including scholars from European and extra-European countries.

Image by David Jones, 2008.

Second Status Report Released

EUscreen is pleased to announce its second status report Online Access to Audiovisual Heritage. In three chapters, the report gives an overview of technological developments bearing an influence on publishing and making accessible historical footage. The report discusses online heritage practices within Europe and beyond.

In a field that faces constant renewal, overhaul and additional challenges, the report means to take stock of the status of the online audiovisual heritage field. This allows the EUscreen project to measure our own strategies and technological development and allows the participating archives, broadcasters and the broader GLAM community to come up with solutions for providing access that cater to users’ needs and environments.

This document is a follow‐up on the first EUscreen status report, published one year ago.

Report Overview