The last session of the Rome Conference, moderated by Erwin Verbruggen, the speakers addressed the issue of user experiences with audiovisual content. What do specific target group want? How to animate users and reach new audiences? Researchers and AV professionals shared their best practices.

Teachers could use more AV content

Karen Vander Paetse demonstrated results of a research carried out by the Flemish Institute for Archiving with the focus on “What do teachers want?” in terms of using audiovisual heritage in the classroom. She stressed the fact that the use of AV material in the teaching process has been highly overestimated and teachers use illustrations much more frequently than clips and audio material. When teachers incorporate AV files into their teaching methods, it’s mostly because they want to better achieve learning objectives, motivate students, explain difficult concepts and improve attention span. On the other hand, teachers asked why they don’t use AV material explained that they have no time to search (22%), don’t have access to available technology (21%) and don’t know how to search (19%). More than 1/3 of the respondents said that they use the material recommended to them by their colleagues. The Flemish Institute for Archiving drew conclusions and implications from research for their own activity. In order to increase the use of AV clips among teachers the quality (not quantity!) of the material should be increased and the search process should be facilitated.

Less text, more interaction!

Rebakah Polding showed how to change a metadata-focused website into an interactive and engaging platform with AV content. The London’s Screen Archives have dramatically redeveloped their website when they realized it created no user engagement and was centered much more around text and information than the real value of the collection – video clips. They followed the examples of British Pathé, History Pin, Yorkshire’s film heritage and Imperial War Museum which were successful in contextualizing the clips and giving users hints and suggestions “what’s so interesting about this video”. They used stills to make more-user friendly environment and borrowed from Amazon which uses its own catalogue to contextualize data. They also looked into the examples of real-life institutions like Tate Modern and the way the museum visitors directly experience modern art. The new website has an entirely new interface which enables to play films directly on the homepage.

Back to the Future

Thanks to Gunnar Liestøl we were able to truly “travel through times”.  He presented so called “situated simulations” tool, which enables to see (on a smartphone or tablet) how the place we’re situated at looked like in the past or will look like in future. t As the user moves in real space the perspective inside the 3D graphic space changes accordingly. The video shows how this incredible tool works:

Engaging the over-65s

Daniela Trevi Gennari, Silvia Dibeluto and Sarah Culhane presented the outcomes of their own research on cinema-going in Rome carried out in 2009. They explored the social experience of cinema-going by interviewing surviving audience members, analyzing their responses and contextualizing them through further archival research. Their methodology included oral history approach, statistical surveys of audiences, box-office takings, and relevant period press material. They focused on the issue of engagement with digital platform by the over-65s and highlighted the occurring trends and challenges, illustrating it with a funny video:

Using a case study of Elena, an elder lady and an active Facebook user, they concluded that “it is our aim to create an online space that facilitates discussion and interaction among users, who can enjoy a sense of community in remembering a shared past, while also engaging younger users who wish to gain insights into their cultural heritage.”

EUscreenXL gathered in Rome last week for our conference on the users and usage of audiovisual archives: “From Audience to User: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online”. In this series of blog posts we fill you in on what happened.

Tom and his archives

After lunch, the conference rode on with its first day packed with presentations.

The slides Deutsche Welle’s Kay Macquarrie showed, opened with a colourful animation about Tom the reporter. Tom is not a big fan of the complications of his work, it seems, and would like smart technologies to help him out. Luckily, the AXES project has spent some time figuring out his wishes and aims to provide for his every search and sorting need.

The search engine uses all sorts of automation and enrichment to decrease the searcher’s time effort. It assumes that researchers have wishes fully different to those of home users and media professionals who want to reuse content. The software will be made available under an open source license for those enthused and willing to try it out.

AXES with Tom – If Only You Knew What’s In Your Archive!

When television is not enough

The demo Lotte Belice Baltussen and Lyndon Nixon showed, was dedicated squarely at the home user – and smart web editors. The LinkedTV project has the noble assumption that television audiences are not willing to switch off their brains when watching, but are most willing to use their smart devices to make themselves smarter too. In order to assist editors in providing a wealth of contextual information, the project searches for for that sweet spot where automatically enriched and linked metadata can provide a world of new experiences.

In the Linked Culture demo the duo showed, the Dutch version of the Antiques Roadshow was enriched with images and explanations pulled in from Europeana. During the coffee break, we saw some conversing going on between the developers in the project and those involved in EUscreenXL, so keep posted to hear if this turns into pretty new uses of our linked data pilot.

LinkedTV demonstration of LinkedCulture

Crowdsource this

Mark Williams took to te stage again to this time root for his own project. The Media Ecology project, or MEP in short, is a fantastically ambitious and wide ranging project that brings together researchers, librarians, archivists and computer scientists and aims to harness the powers of two library and archive buzzwords: linked data and crowdsourcing. MEP provides access to the Library of Congress via Mediathread and allows a selected group of academics to update and improve on descriptions. The archives can then harvest back metadata generated through MEP project. The project’s access point provides enhanced search capacity for the LoC’s materials, enhances search capacity for other archives and helps the academic & scholarly community help in their workflow at the same time. An important aid in this process is the use of a controlled vocabulary, which in this project is baptised the Onomy. The project makes use of a wide range of open source tools, such as the Computational Cinematics Toolkit in Python and the related Tiltfactor, doing metadata games.

The big launch

Kamila Lewandowska, Sian Barber and Rutger Rozendal all work on the EUscreenXL project. The three of them have been the main drivers behind the EUscreen portal redesign, and therefor the honour was bestowed upon them to present its feats and design choices. The new portal is made adaptive so it can be seen on all sorts of devices, search is made more intuitive and all together it boasts an editorial approach, feeding users more content in more appealing ways. Also, some important steps in providing subtitles for selected clips have been provided. Meanwhile the strengths of the portal – rich, interchangeable metadata and descriptions – are still there and improvements will be taking place over the next few months, as well as new possibilities for contextualisation. We do suggest you go there straight after reading this post to find out all that’s new and shiny: http://www.euscreen.eu

The Q&A session focused on the benefits of crowdsourcing and lessons learned in this space, including how to convince archive personnel of the usefulness of involving non-professionals in describing archive content. The presentations led one commenter to describe his response as a Faustian dilemma, where he needed to choose between using one of the many fantastic tools available but unable to solve the growing gap between their development and their integration into teaching & digital/audiovisual literacy. As far as we could understand from the panel members, they all seemed to have good trust in their visions of smarter, connected, wired, searchable and automated collections – and the people we hope will be using them.

Drawing made at the conference by Montse Fortino.
Pictures taken at the conference by Maria Drabczyk/Quirijn Backx/Erwin Verbruggen

EUscreenXL gathered in Rome last week for our conference on the users and usage of audiovisual archives: “From Audience to User: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online”. In this series of blog posts we fill you in on what happened. Session II was dedicated to audiovisual stories & best practices.

Digitization, media education, live performances – all under one roof

The session, moderated by Marco Rendina from  Cinecittá LUCE was opened with a presentation by Michał Merczyński, director of  National Audiovisual Institute (NInA). This public cultural institution is based in Warsaw, Poland and was set up in 2005 as a publishing house, then transformed into NInA in 2009. The focus of NInA lies on digitizing and publishing the archives documenting Poland’s audiovisual heritage and becoming a leading cultural institution in this field.

The key objective of the Institute is to enrich its audiovisual archives by creating context and making access more user-friendly. In its video on demand service, launched last year, NInA started building thematic collections concentrated on one single access point. One such example is the portal Three Composers, which was shortlisted for the FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievements Awards in 2014.

A short video tutorial explaining how to navigate through Three Composers music collection.

NInA cooperates with national and international partners specialised in film, music and theatre, Google Cultural Institute and many more. Around 98% of the content available on its main access point - NINATEKA – is free of charge. Through NINATEKA EDU – the biggest educational project of the Institute, there are more than 1700 items, special collections and additional educational recources available for teachers. Although the web is the most natural environment for NInA’s activities, the Institute engages in various programmes in the real world to create an interest in the use of digital archives and to engage the end users.  With a new venue to be opened in May 2015, NInA keeps being in transition between the analog and the digital era and tries to link the old with the new. After Michał Merczyński’s presentation a shared feeling was visible among the audience: we may not be able to pronounce any of the names or tools but NInA surely got us engaged!

Breaking News: 1914 can still inspire!

From Poland to France. After a packed and inspiring presentation about a freshly set up AV institution Laurent Duret from Les Films d’Ici took us on a journey into the past. The aim of his long-term, interactive and in-depth narrative project 1914:Breaking news was to bring back the collective memory from the First World War. As the understanding of the events of 1914-1918  obviously differs in France and Germany, a decision was made to focus on these two. Even though the contract for the project was signed in Berlin in 2009, it took Mr. Duret and his international team of historians, archivists and museum experts four long years of research before the documentary was finally finished. All scenes in the film were inspired by 14 diaries from all over Europe, in order to get a broad view of the daily life of the time. In cooperation with ARTE and various newspaper publishers in Europe, the material was broadcasted on a mobile website first, that kept a calendar of daily events leading up to the war. Only later was the documentary shown on television.

1914 Breaking news trailer from Laurent Duret

In order to attract wider attention of various target groups in an innovative and interactive way, Mr Duret and his team drew special attention to shareability and presence on social media. Moreover an online music quiz was developed in which users had to find out if the lyrics of a particular song belonged to a 1914 pop song or a contemporary hip hop song from 2014. This website had over one million unique visitors and about 30 million people saw the documentary on TV. 1914: Breaking news is a marvelous example of digital storytelling and shows how to engage millions of people with a challenging topic, depicting one of Europe’s darkest times.

A DIVE in Digital Hermeneutics

Lora Aroyo from the VU University Amsterdam added an academic perspective to the conversation by holding the last presentation of the session with a special focus on digital hermeneutics and the CrowdTruth platform – a framework for crowdsourcing ground truth data. The aim of the project is to get the data to train, test and evaluate cognitive computing systems. In terms of user engagement, the question for Aroyo remains: how to make this engagement possible in a more scalable and reusable way? In contrast to the common approach – namely asking experts – engaging a large crowd allows different interpretations (harnessing disagreement) and annotations. The CrowdTruth workflow involves three main steps: exploring and processing input data, collecting annotation data, and applying disagreement analytics on the results.

Mrs. Aroyo pointed out that when in a museum, people are guided through exhibitions. On the internet, they are left to themselves. A support is missing. The web is chaos! The argument led Lora Aroyo swiftly to the second part of her speech, in which she presented the DIVE browser - developed to provide innovative access on heritage objects from heterogeneous collections, using historical events and narratives as the context for searching, browsing and presenting of individual and group objects. DIVE is supposed to help people in their online exploration and research. Its interface invites users to continue their explorations by “diving into” a topic and get to infinity of exploration. DIVE is definitely a wonderful “How to…” approach on user engagement – you should want to try it for yourself.

Drawing made at the conference by Montse Fortino.
Pictures taken at the conference by Maria Drabczyk/Quirijn Backx

On the eve of the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a unique exhibition entitled ‘Roads to 1989. East-Central Europe 1939-1989.’ was launched in the German capital. The exhibition documents the complicated process through which this part of Europe regained its freedom from communist dictatorship. The exhibition is part of ‘Freedom Express’, a social and educational campaign organised by ENRS, ministries responsible for culture in Poland, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia and local partners. EUscreenXL Consortium and Europeana are partners of the project.

The exhibition concentrates on the various ways in which civil liberties were limited in the former communist block and on attempts made to regain them. It focuses especially on the question of what connects and divides remembrance of the events that preceded the fall of communism in Central and Eastern European. The content of the exhibition reveals a story of the different faces of freedom. Individual parts of the exhibition are devoted to freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion and belief, economic freedom and other themes.

EUscreenXL contributed to the exhibition by creating a unique, moving and historically meaningful video production. It includes archival content that shows important and commonly recognizable personalities and events from the political transformation time in Europe of 1989 and depicts crucial social phenomena also typical for the period. It represents one of the first try-outs of the EUscreen Network activities aimed at reaching new audiences and stepping out of the online world by preparing a physical exhibition.

The video was created by EUscreenXL partners – Deutsche Welle, The Lithuanian Central State Archive, RTV Slovenia, Czech Tevision, National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary, National Audiovisual Institute of Poland (in collaboration with Video Studio Gdańsk), and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

The exhibition will be shown on 4-10 November on Dorothea-Schlegel-Platz – a square located close to the historic Friedrichstraße train station, which, between the years 1961 to 1990, served as a railway border crossing between East and West Berlin.

After Berlin, ‘Roads to 1989’ will be shown this year in Brussels (14-24 November) and Warsaw (28 November-15 December).

Alongside the European tour of the exhibition, its digital version is also available at: http://1989.enrs.eu/exhibition.

Freedom Express is asocial and educational campaign organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. Its first part was a study trip whereby a group of young artists, journalists and historians visited Solidarity’s Gdańsk, then Warsaw, Budapest, Sopron, Timisoara, Bratislava, Prague and Berlin. The trip’s agenda of meetings, workshops and artistic activities was made possible thanks to the cooperation of a number of institutions involved with 20^th century history.

More information is available at www.freedomexpress.enrs.eu

You can also follow the event on Facebook.

Source: ENRS press information and own materials.
Photos: Krzysztof Dobrogowski, Copyright: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity

EUscreenXL gathered in Rome last week for our conference on the users and usage of audiovisual archives: “From Audience to Users: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online”. In this series of blog posts we’ll fill you in on what happened.

Last week was a busy one for audiovisual archivists! The week in which we celebrated  the World Day of Audiovisual Heritage saw no less than six events related to our moving image heritage – not to speak of the International Federation of Television Archives‘ world conference in Amsterdam, which we visited the week before. In Mexico, the SIPAD symposium was teaching a generation of Latin-American archivists how to care for AV heritage. In Switzerland, EUscreenXL partner EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, gathered a group to discuss the technical merits of archival operations, the importance of metadata (including for EUscreenXL) and strategic questions such as whether public broadcasters have a duty to provide archives.

In Spain meanwhile, the Europeana network came together to discuss how it would update its ways of collaborating to continue being the hadron collider for cultural heritage. And as Ina’s training team was teaching novices to the field how to take care of moving image materials in its FRAME series, and the Federation of Film Archives’ executive committee met in Stockholm, we, archivists and academics linked to the EUscreen network, joined each other in Rome to discuss topics, tools and triangulations around giving access to broadcast and moving image materials that have withstood the tests of time.

The Rome conference we set up filled two days – one in which we focused on stories and examples from the field, and one in which we spent discussing in various workshops. Meanwhile, the conference was also the location for the General Assembly of the EUscreen network and for scholarly activities, such as a meeting of the European (Post)Socialist Television History Network and the editorial board of EUscreen’s VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture. So in a nutshell: a lot of words being exchanged, a lot of bonds reinforced and a lot of ideas shared. This was truly a week in which the famed double helix of preserving and giving access to audiovisual heritage, as Peter Kaufman so eloquently put it once, was at the heart of the conversation.

Archives on YouTube

Italy’s Ministry of Culture has a representative for film culture. That is in and of itself a remarkable feat and – if you ask us – a sign of being an utmost civilized nation. Mr. Nicola Borrelli opened the conference, stressing the importance of film and audiovisual heritage for the country and mentioning it as one of the most important issues of the current Italian presidency of the European Union. Our morning speaker on the first day was Mr. Roger Felber.

An example of a clip British Pathé made more Relevant to contemporary audiences by changing its title.

Mr. Felber is a British business man with an impressive track record, whose investment group owns the British Pathé collection. His opening talk may seem like a strange choice for EUscreenXL. Why put all this effort in developing a portal such as EUscreen to then open your arms to organisations who use YouTube? While it is true that the series of projects and collaborations that brought forth EUscreen predates the existence of the video mogul , it is of course no stranger to EUscreen’s members. Various organisations, such as Cinecittá LUCE, TV Romania’s archives and Sound and Vision, have made substantial amounts of video available through Google’s platform. While for archival curation many of us question its lack of rich metadata, for example, there are obvious advantages to using the platform – audience reach being high on that list. What we hoped to learn from Mr. Felber was how this reach can be seen, thought of, explored and improved upon.

The Three R’s

His experiences did not disappoint. As Mr. Felber admitted, his organisation does not move without it resulting in “cold, hard cash” – an approach that the mostly public service directed organisations in EUscreen are less prone to. Mr. Felber relayed the steps his organisation had taken to publish its 95.000 videos online in one go. After discovering many of their films had already made it online via private persons’ interests and unvetted activities, the organisation decided to make the jump. YouTube has a robust advertising scheme and a fingerprinting algorithm that allows content owners to redirect the advertising income from third party or individual uploaders they would’ve otherwise missed out on. A win-win situation for British Pathé’s rights holders.

Mr. Felber then – without the use of PowerPoint or presenter’s notes – kept his audience captivated with his story of how the group focused on creating impact with the collection. He bundled British Pathé’s lessons for audience reach in a maxim consisting of three R’s: Regularity, Relevance and Reliability. Publish materials with a dependable regularity, make them relevant to the people who need to see them and make sure you can be considered a reliable source.

An important lesson for British Pathé – and a rather frightening idea to the researchers in the room – was that changing the titles of the videos made them more find- and clickable – a lesson mirrorred by recent developments in the publishing world, where ‘clickbait’ titles and title-focused enterprises such as Upworthy are all the rage.

British Pathé puts music under all its silent clips, unlike this film fragment from the Cinematek in Brussels.

In the panel that followed suit, project coordinator Eggo Müller welcomed Sonja de Leeuw and Mark Williams at the table to discuss specific parts of the online delivery process. Topics included questions such as audience specificity – a general audience consisting of many smaller niche audiences – and the true meanings of audience engagement. Markedly different were the approaches to media the academic researchers in the room voiced – their primary concern is that of the untouched, true original.

Another hot topic for discussion – recurrent in the EUscreen family – was that of allowing free access to a collection that is used for footage licensing. The balance was decidedly positive: besides generating extra income via YouTube’s advertising, the British Pathé collections have become much more known because of its publication, and footage sales have increased in never before served territories.

Linda Kaye closed the Q&A session with  a comment on the resources of the metadata. In British Pathé’s tumultuous history, its original paper archive was once tossed in the bin, rescued from there and now available for researchers at the British Universities Film and Video Council. A challenging anecdote to close this session, that reunites the need for a broad audience reach with the importance of the daily grinds and duties of archive operations.

Drawing made at the conference by Montse Fortino.
Pictures taken at the conference by Maria Drabczyk/Quirijn Backx

We are proud to announce the launch of the renewed EUscreen website during our today’s International Conference From Audience to User: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online that is now taking place in Rome, Italy. 

The EUscreen portal offers free online access to thousands of items of audiovisual heritage. It brings together videos, stills, text and audio that provide an insight into the social, cultural, political and economic events that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries.

The re-developed EUscreen portal offers a brand new experience. The platform is user-friendly and dynamic, inviting visitors to play the videos and discover new content. It gives users a chance to explore the crème de la crème of Europe’s rich broadcast history on the homepage where a selection of specially chosen content is displayed. These video highlights showcase a range of material from across Europe and have been specifically chosen by the contributing archives. Users can explore videos dealing with current affairs and topical issues from the early 1900s until today. They can also watch series and collections ranging from broadcast series to collections of amateur films. The new version of the portal is optimised to be accessible on mobile devices and allows content to be easily shared.

In order to make the content accessible internationally, the portal provides English subtitles for a range of videos. Finally, an exhibition builder (available soon) will allow users to create virtual exhibitions and facilitate the use of videos, photos and audio material.

Over the next few weeks, the website will continually be updated, in response to users feedback. We invite you to stay tuned and get back to us with your feedback!

Over the last decade the label “media archaeology” has brought together a growing number of heterogeneous scholarship investigating new forms of historical research and narratives. While the field resists a coherent methodology, media archaeological explorations are generally characterized by their refusal of linear periodization, an emphasis on disregarded objects and historical episodes, and a playful approach of media as hybrid, non-fixed, and unstable material, cultural, discursive and imaginary artifacts.

Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and -Realities

This issue of VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture invites archeological inquiries into the multiple pasts of tele-visions. Since late nineteenth century imaginations of “seeing by electricity”, the phenomenon of “seeing at a distance” has known multiple futures and pasts, deaths and revivals. The aim of this issue is to assess the many lives of television in its different technological stages (electro-mechanical, electrical, electronic and digital) and to highlight the complexity practices, programs and discourses that have shaped television as a technical infrastructure, political and social institution, cultural phenomenon and business model from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

The theme of the 7th issue of VIEW (Vol. 4, spring 2015) seeks to shine a light on the multiple histories of television and welcomes contributions that propose archeological excavations from different disciplinary and thematic points of view.

Untold Histories and Forgotten Practices

Proposals are invited on (but not limited to):

• Object biographies and hybrid technologies: description of obsolete or forgotten technologies and/or apparatuses; hybridity of emerging audio/visual technologies;
• Archaeology of TV spectatorship: problematizing historical audiences of television beyond domestic consumption;
• Politics of television: gendering TV before its integration of domestic space; archeology of television’s military uses; shaping television as a consumer object;
• Questioning televisual paradigms: liveness, simultaneity, ubiquity, participation, etc.
• Symbolic engineering: imagined and configured uses in both fictional and factional sources
• Archaeology of televisual programs and formats: intermedial links of early televisual texts;
• Experimental media archaeology: reenactments and reconstitutions of television technologies and practices;
• Non-conformist histories of tv: histories of guerilla TV, non-profit and educational television.
• Archaeology of digital television: histories of televisual participation and interactivity;

Practical

Contributions are encouraged from authors with different expertise and interests in television and media history.

Paper proposals (max. 500 words) are due on November 30th, 2014. Submissions should be sent to the managing editor of the journal, Dana Mustata (journal@euscreen.eu). A notice of acceptance will be send to authors on third week of December. Articles (2-4,000 words) will be due on March 1st, 2015.

For further information or questions about the issue, please contact the co-editors: Andreas Fickers (andreas.fickers@uni.lu) and Anne-Katrin Weber (anne-katrin.weber@unil.ch)

See www.viewjournal.eu for the current and back issues. VIEW is proud to be an open access journal. All articles are made findable through the DOAJ and EBSCO databases.

Photo credit: Michael Shaheen (CC ND-NC)

It was four hectic days at the Gothenburg Fair 25-28 September. EUscreenXL, through the National Library of Sweden (KB), shared a booth with Swedish Television and Swedish Film Institute. During the four days a constant flow of visitors passed by, testing the EUscreen portal. This year the fair had 97 133 visitors.

Visitors to the “EUscreenXL booth” were keen to learn more about the three portals on display, namely euscreen.eu, filmarkivet.se, and Öppet Arkiv (oppetarkiv.se). Reactions were overwhelming regarding the fact that so much audiovisual content was open and easily accessed. Part from the general public especially librarians and teachers expressed how this facilitated their work. Many stayed for a prolonged time submerged in memories as they browsed through old news content and favourite programmes, or just sat down resting their legs in the booth’s relaxing corner.

The first day ended with a well-attended reception. The EUscreenXL crew felt that only this first day was more than hoped for but there were three more days to come. The second day started with a seminar hosted by KB dedicated to a panel about new digital expectations and EUscreenXL in particular. The seminar was well visited. The discussion circulated around how EUscreen will meet user expectancies with the launch of the new portal in late October 2014.

During the following days the flow of visitors did not ebb out. Talking to users gave valuable feedback on the work of making Europe’s television heritage accessible. Several users during the days expressed a spontaneous and positive reflection that the euscreen.eu site did not have any adds or pop-up windows. Talks with users from different fields of work and experiences also revealed the importance of describing the purpose of a portal like euscreen.eu. Overall the response was very positive and with tiered legs and soar throats the EUscreenXL crew made their way back home.

Actor/Writer/Director Lasse Åberg visiting the booth

(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0959717)

Photo courtesy of Jan Göransson (Swedish Film Institute)