Call for Papers - Media Homes: Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Domestic Life
Friday June 29, 2012 (University of Amsterdam)

Picture by Foxtongue on Flickr

During the early‐twentieth century, a raft of media technologies emerged against the backdrop of
urbanization, industrialization and rationalization. At the same time, the private dwelling developed into a centerpiece of modern conceptions of everyday life. While the domestication of media and their adoption for everyday consumption became one of the crucial factors for constructions of private and public space (Morley 2000), the same holds true for the mediation of the domestic, as new visions and representations of the home invaded magazines, movies, radio broadcasts and TV programs (Spigel 2001).

The conference seeks to explore the close – but rarely discussed – entanglement of these two phenomena in the context of recent debates on materiality in the humanities. Older tensions between approaches focusing on immaterial ‘representations’ on the one hand, and material ‘social practices’ on the other, now seem to have been replaced: firstly, by a common interest in representations and, secondly, by a growing concern for the significance of materiality in social life more generally. ʹMedia homesʹ can thus serve as a test case for investigating the new possibilities created by this situation.

Participants are invited to reconnect the strands between media and material culture, as framed within the locus of the interior and domestic life. Both the concept of ʹmediaʹ and of ʹmaterialityʹ are approached from two angles: the different media used to convey new visions of domestic material culture should be analyzed in their function of not only representing but also molding and creating the ‘home’. At the same time, all media – be it books, radios or personal computers – are material objects in themselves that conquer the private home and give it new meaning as a space of media consumption. The home itself thus emerges as ‘mediated’ in two ways: as a represented – imagined and conceptualized ‐ social space and as a space shaped by the material presence of media.

Against this background a set of key questions can be raised: how are old and new media technologies given meaning within everyday life and family relations? In what ways do domestic dwellers engage with media discourses concerning domestic lifestyle and home improvement? To what extent are categories of class, gender and ethnicity bound up with media consumption and related cultural practices within the home? What are the sensory, embodied dimensions to media consumption within the domestic sphere (visibility and audibility, as well as touch, taste and smell)? In what ways did the onset of digital media encourage a rethinking of the domestic sphere (as ʹhome theatreʹ or smart home)?

Themes for the conference may include, but are not limited to:

• Media representations of the home, domestic life and ʹconspicuous consumptionʹ
• Home recording and amateur media practices
• Memory practices and forms of collecting based on media and the domestic sphere (diaries, scrapbooks, mementos)
• Trends such as miniaturization and portability, with new constructions of the interior or domestic in public life (e.g. mobile technologies in the car, mobile phones, portable stereos)
• The relationship between private and public forms of media consumption (cinema‐going, portable stereos)
• Paradigmatic shifts in conceptualizations of the home and domestic life, and the challenge of periodization for researchers
• The relationship of the ʹmedia homeʹ to urban, regional, national, and international or transnational identity categories

Please send abstracts (max. 500 words) and a short CV before 20 January 2012 to Natalie Scholz
n.scholz@uva.nl /Carolyn Birdsall c.j.birdsall@uva.nl. A publication related to the conference is planned for February 2013.

On December 1st, Europeana published its second White Paper, The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: a Business Model perspective on Open Metadata [PDF]. The title, ‘The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid’, centres on Johannes Vermeer’s iconic painting, The Milkmaid. In a survey Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum found over 10,000 poor, yellowing copies of their great picture online. How to put a stop to the circulation of bad copies, give people a real sense of the true colour of the picture and stop them questioning the colours of the posters and postcards sold in their shop?  The Rijksmuseum solved the problem by putting a high resolution copy of the Milkmaid online with open metadata, so that it could be easily referenced and shared. ‘Opening up our data,’ says the Rijksmuseum, ‘is our best defence against the ‘yellow Milkmaid’. The paper is the result of a roundtable that brought together leading figures in the cultural heritage sector. The experts examined the opportunities and risks associated with open licensing of their massive datasets, which comprise the record of all publications and cultural artefacts in Europe.

Expert Workshop members

On Friday, Dec. 2nd, The British Universities Film & Video Council, together with Royal Holloway University of London, will announce the EUscreen project to the audiences of Great Britain during a conference titled The Key to More Acces. Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Sian Barber will present the project in their presentation, titled: Screening Europe - Europe on Screen.

The Key to More Access

How improved data and a single search-box can open the door to greater content

Friday 2 December 2011 (10.30am onwards)

The Geological Society, Piccadilly, London

A BUFVC forum to discuss how current BUFVC projects will result in improved and integrated access to moving image and sound content. The BUFVC will build on the ‘Power of the VHS’ events with the announcement of ambitious plans to join up television and radio holdings data held by both broadcasters & UK educational institutions with its own expanding integrated database.  The HEFCEfunded project will be another step closer to providinga ‘one-stop-shop’ for moving image and sound material.

Other projects to be discussed include:

• BUFVC federated search – an innovative ‘all-in-one’ search engine accessing over 13 million records
• Channel 4 & British Film Culture project
• launch of latest EUscreen portal (Europe’s television heritage)
• Chronicle: BBC Northern Ireland’s television news from the 60s and 70s

Presentations will include any issues faced during the project and how they were overcome to improve the end user experience and the resulting moving image and sound content.

Download a copy of the programme here (subject to change).

For more information: http://bufvc.ac.uk/events/keytomoreaccess

EUscreen partner ERT Archives, from Greece, have taken an important step in making the Hellenic radio and television heritage accessible to all Greek-speaking people. State-of-the art technology now provides access to digital content to people with disabilities. On the website www.ert-archives.gr, ERT Archives developed and implemented innovative software that takes away all restrictions to enjoy valuable audiovisual content online.

The service’s web pages were designed with disabled people in mind and follow international standards for access. It uses special software that puts together the media files for the Web and  also makes use of a media player that supports functionalities specifically developed for the visually or hearing impaired. These include big and clearly distinct control buttons, control of basic functions via the keyboard, audio descriptions, etc.

In this pilot stage, ERT Archives makes television programmes of the digital channel prisma+ available to everyone with special access services for disabled people. These programs were produced by ERT within the framework of the Digital Convergence operational programme of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), 2007-2013, which was co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund. ERT Archives aim to extend the use of these new services to content already available through the website as part of its policy, which is also supported by other NSRF-funded projects.

Link: www.ert-archives.gr

Yesterday, November 23d, marked the Belgian launch event of EUscreen.

The EUscreen portal in its new form stepped out into the world on October 27th – World Day of Audiovisual Heritage – and was presented to the Belgian media during a press conference in Brussels.

The site was welcomed with great enthusiasm, and urged by stories on the radio and national news, people enthusiastically started perusing on the portal. This sudden great attention caused some issues with our servers. On the upside, the day turned out to be a fantastic stress test.

We apologise to those who have experienced slow response times and hope we can win back your trust. This day was a great test for the system and allowed us to make it more robust, more stable and more keen to process all of your enthusiastic search requests.

Meanwhile, we keep adding content and features to the site to make it a useful resource for all of the different user groups in each and every of the 18 European countries that contribute to the project.

An overview of Press sources:
- De Redactie: 1.000 ITEMS UIT 50-JARIG VRT-ARCHIEF OP HET INTERNET
- De Standaard: Europees televisie-erfgoed online op EUscreen
- Gazet van Antwerpen: Europees televisie-erfgoed online op EUscreen
- Radio: A radio interview on Radio 2 with Philippe Van Meerbeeck (in Dutch)
- Radio: Studio Brussel’s Tomas Staat Op spent a great deal of attention on the portal.

A small overview of Twitter users who enthusiastically discovered the site:

Today we’re proud to release the promotional video for the EUscreen project:

We’d like to invite you to spread it around: Embed it on your website, send it to friends who haven’t yet discovered the project or use it in presentations around the world. We hope the video will explain what EUscreen is all about, what it can be used for and why you should delve in and explore the rich archival content that’s there.

Credits:

EUscreen: Explore Your Past was created by Anna Dabrowska, intern at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and student at the Amsterdam MA Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image, who assembled the video using and remixing footage from various EUscreen partners. Job de Haas at NISV did the sound, Jacky Spears the voice over.

Footage sources:

• Danish Broadcasting Corporation
• Institut National de l’Audiovisuel
• National Library of Sweden
• Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
• Österreichischer Rundfunk
• Televisió de Catalunya
• Radio Télévision Belge Francophone
• Radio Televizija Slovenija

- from: http://cstonline.tv:

The second symposium arising from the AHRC ‘Spaces of Television’ project will be held at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries (University of Glamorgan) on Friday 20 April 2012.

Proposals are invited for papers and/or panels on the theme of ‘Performance and Television Space’. Performance in this context should be interpreted in the broadest sense to include the full range of communicative elements in programme making, especially acting.

The project focuses specifically on television drama in Britain between 1955 and 1994, and we particularly welcome papers in this area, though we will also consider comparative perspectives (e.g. performance in dramas from other television industries, acting on television compared with film, transnational exchange/ co-productions).

Possible topics include but should not be limited to:

• Acting styles in different genres (social realism, fantasy, horror) and spaces of production (studio or location)
• Close analyses of the relationships between different performance elements in particular programmes or series
• The institutional and/or, technological and/or production determinants on performance
• The relationships between performance and wider social and cultural movements and themes; the social and cultural meanings of performance in different spatial and aesthetic contexts
• Histories and historiographies of television drama performance, particularly relating to production strategies and institutional contexts.
• Case studies of particular actors and/or programmes in relation to performance and space.
• The impact of different ‘schools’ or theories of acting on British TV drama performance.
• The role of production personnel, such as casting directors and directors of programmes, in determining preferred approaches to performance in British television drama.
• The relationships between early TV drama and theatre

Proposals in the form of a 250-word abstract (or panel outline) should be submitted to Professor Stephen Lacey (swlacey@glam.ac.uk) by 6 January 2012.

We envisage 20-minute papers with no parallel sessions. We welcome proposals from both established scholars and early career researchers including postgraduate students.

Spaces of Television is an AHRC-funded research project led by the University of Reading in collaboration with the University of Leicester and the University of Glamorgan.