The Second International Conference of the Women’s Film and Television History Network – UK/Ireland will take place from 10th to 12th April 2014 at The University of East Anglia, UK.

Building on the success of the first ‘Doing Women’s Film History’ conference held in 2011, this three-day international conference will bring together researchers in women’s film and television history, archivists, curators and creative practitioners to explore and celebrate all aspects of women’s participation within the visual media industries across the globe and in all periods. The conference will provide a forum for the latest research into women’s work in film and television production (both on screen and off screen), in film distribution and exhibition, their roles in television ranging from presenters and personalities to commissioners and controllers, as well as women’s activities as film and television critics, consumers and fans.

Papers on any topic related to women’s film, television and media history are welcome. Also, the conference organisers invite all interested in hosting panels and strands on the following areas:

* women and documentary: whose voices, which audiences, to whose benefit?

* screenwriters and scriptwriting: the woman writer

* women’s contributions to non-Anglophone film and television industries

* feminist filmmakers and filmmaking collectives

* female film and television fan cultures

* teaching women’s film and television history

Proposals of 300 words for papers should be sent todoingwomensfilmandtvhistory@uea.ac.uk no later than 31st October 2013

Conference organisers: Laraine Porter (De Montfort University), Yvonne Tasker (University of East Anglia) and Melanie Williams (University of East Anglia)

On 18th July 2013, the EUscreenXL project was presented as part of the panel ‘Digital Archive Projects: Rethinking Media Studies Methodologies’ at the 25^th International IAMHIST Conference held at the University of Leicester, UK. It was the second time EUscreen was present at the IAMHIST Conference, after the 24^th International IAMHIST Conference themed ‘Media History and Cultural Memory’ at Copenhagen University in 2011.

Report by Berber Hagedoorn, MA (Utrecht University)

The International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) is an organization of filmmakers, broadcasters, archivists and scholars dedicated to historical inquiry into film, radio, television, and related media. IAMHIST encourages scholarly research into the relations between history and the media as well as the production of historically informed documentaries, television series, and other media texts. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Childhood and the Media’.

The last decade we have witnessed an explosion of available digital databases and archives, and accordingly, the development of different tools to explore these archives in new ways. The panel ‘Digital Archive Projects: Rethinking Media Studies Methodologies’ discussed the possibilities and limitations of tools to explore digitised television, newspaper and radio archives for media scholars and historians. Each paper presented a particular project, its possible use for future research and a specific case study conducted by means of the tools. The panel was chaired by Luke McKernan (British Library, London).

Berber Hagedoorn from Utrecht University presented the EUscreenXL project, which aims to overcome the fragmentation of the audiovisual heritage sector in Europe and to make a growing collection of contextualised audiovisual content accessible and meaningful for diverse types of users, from the general audience, researchers and teachers, to professionals in the creative industries. Hagedoorn paid specific attention to the opportunities and challenges of the project and EUscreen portal for academic research. As a cross-national database of sources, the portal offers access to a range of audiovisual content in different languages, connected to various historical topics. Hagedoorn focused particularly on how the EUscreen portal and the use of European cultural resources lends itself to doing comparative research on the coverage of particular topics and genres across countries in Europe.

Martijn Kleppe from Erasmus University Rotterdam discussed the PoliMedia project, which showcases the potential of cross-media analysis by linking digitised transcriptions of debates at the Dutch Parliament with newspapers, radio bulletins, newscasts and current affairs programmes. Kleppe explained the workings of the PoliMedia portal and its possible future use for media scholars, discussing how the portal will allow researchers to browse for debates or names of politicians and analyse related media coverage, as well as evaluating debates in which politicians appeared and how they were covered in the press. As Kleppe pointed out, an advantage of the PoliMedia project is that the coverage in the media is incorporated in its original form, enabling analyses of the mark-up of news articles, newspaper photos, and televised programme footage.

Jasmijn van Gorp from Utrecht University presented the project BRIDGE: Building Rich Links to Enable Television History, in which she zoomed in on two tools developed by this project for exploration and contextualisation. MeRDES (Media Researchers’ Data Exploration Suite) enables comparative analysis between two individual items from the television catalogue of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision archives, through visualisations such as word clouds and timelines. Secondly, CoMeRDA (Contextualising Media Researchers’ Data) links different collections, including television programmes, national newspapers and television-related photographs, and enables simultaneous search across these collections. Van Gorp demonstrated how the discussed tools ‘bridge’ or build links between heterogeneous collections, therefore allowing media researchers, historians, and digital humanists to explore, analyse and compare (elements of) Dutch television history.

The discussion session highlighted the necessity of translation, in particular for transnational or European-wide archival projects. This is especially the case for EUscreenXL which, as an audiovisual online archive, is also more dependent on its metadata to allow researchers to explore the archive for relevant content. Translation and subtitling will therefore not only aid in the usability of the audiovisual content, but in improving the searchability of the EUscreen portal, too.

All presentations touched upon how analysing media coverage across several types of media forms or outlets is a challenging task for researchers. New digital tools to explore archives therefore allow researchers to study more and new sources as well as generating novel research questions. The panel enabled a fruitful dialogue with media scholars and historians, emphasizing the relevance for scholars in the Humanities to further engage in digital archival projects.

Our colleagues from the Europeana Awareness project held their second Licensing Workshop in Luxemburg on the 13th and 14th of June. Réka Markovich went to present the efforts EUscreen has taken to bring a massive broadcast collection with different national copyright laws online. She represented the new EUscreenXL project, in which we’ll continue our research and approaches on providing access to audiovisual heritage. 

Report by Réka Markovich from ELTE University, Hungary.

Europeana Awareness is a Best-Practice Network led by the Europeana Foundation. It’s been designed to publicize Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians and cultural heritage organizations in every Member State. The second Europeana Licensing workshop was part of research undertaken for the Europeana Awareness project by the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg, Kennisland and the Institute for Information Law (IvIR). Their research focuses on possible international licensing models for digital heritage and the legal framework for cross-border licensing of copyright-protected works in Europe. In practice, this means that it explores the conditions under which works contained in the collections of cultural heritage institutions could be regulated on a cross-border basis in the context of Europeana.

Models for Cross-Border Licensing

The workshop aimed at gathering information to map the practice and implementation of the Orphan Works Directive and possible alternative contractual arrangements (such as those based on the Memorandum of Understanding on Out-of-Commerce Works). It complements a questionnaire to the European member states about the creation of an international database of Orphan Works. Member States will have to pass legislation implementing the Directive by October 2014. As far as the database is concerned, they will have to play the role of “interface” between beneficiary institutions (libraries etc) and  the office for the harmonisation of the internal market (OHIM), an EU agency with responsibility in the area of IPR, based in Alicante, Spain. The focus of this process is to identify possible loopholes in the cross-border access and re-use of works that is caused by differing national arrangements regarding categories of works, beneficiaries, scope and conditions of use, etc. For those who’d like to get an idea of the wide variety of copyrights clearance regulations in different European countries, the Public Domain Calculator gives you a good idea.

Cross-border access and use depend not only on a clear legal framework, but also on effective data collection and rights management. Therefore the workshop’s first day focused on the practical implementation of data registries, data creation and data exchange processes between the relevant actors. It was interesting to see what kind of organizations work on copyright clearance: e.g. with facilitating rights information management (ARROW) or with developing building blocks for the expression and management of rights and licensing across all content and media types (Linked Content Coalition). While legal issues cannot be easily separated from more administrative issues, day two focused on legal interoperability issues of implementing alternative (contractual) mechanisms.

Rights for Audiovisual Works

Issues of intellectual property rights are crucial when providing access to audiovisual collections. As a part of legislation, copyright law still bears some territorial nature – while a Pan-European audiovisual archive touches upon cross-border legal issues. Some kind of harmonization would be necessary to ensure the possibility of publishing and providing access to our audiovisual heritage. The Memorandum of Understanding on Key Principles on the Digitization and Making Available of Out-of-Commerce Works is sector-specific: it covers books and learned journals only. A dialogue between stakeholders is the way forward to facilitate agreements for the digitization of European out-of-commerce cultural material in other sectors—e.g. on audiovisual works—as well.

EUscreenXL will provide Europeana with 1.000.000 metadata records giving access for online content held by European broadcasters and audiovisual archives and will publish 20.000 contextualized programmes on the EUscreen portal. As the audiovisual content aggregator for Europeana, all the work packages of EUscreenXL take their cue from Europeana’s working groups. In EUscreenXL we are also working on a strategic agenda for access to audio-visual heritage through Europeana. The task is a pan-European research effort. It covers seven topics closely related to the daily reality of audio-visual archives, one of which is intellectual property rights. This activity is essential for Europeana to reach out to the audio-visual domain  and understand what needs to be put in place in order to maximize contributions to Europeana. It was therefor fascinating to hear about the legal issues-related activities of Europeana, to be in touch with the Europeana project working groups and the people behind them.

More information

• A good introduction to copyright issues for cultural heritage, with examples from the audiovisual domain, can be found in Dr. Paul Klimpel’s Copyright Law, Practice and Fiction. [PDF]
• All presentations from the workshop have been published on the Europeana Licensing Slideshare.
• More info on European copyright themes can be found on the website Licenses for Europe.
• Lisette Kalshoven’s account of this workshop was published on the Europeana Pro blog.
• See our list of relevant literature on IPR on our IPR reference page or on Zotero.

“Meet someone you don’t know – with problems you do know”

Key Topics of the conference include:

• Sector-based responses to the changing technological nature of media assets in our collections and archives
• Sector-based trends in preservation technology
• Institutional responses to how collection and preservation mandates are realised and stretched by the digital
• Media preservation as a sound investment; new methodologies for valuing our media assets
• The psychology of preservation; our motivations and dynamics in practice
• Maintaining a vision in a culture of operational alliances and partnerships
• Acknowledging and advocating for difference; understanding the impact of sector-based and institutional distinction on preservation strategies and solutions

Featured Speakers include:

• Matthew Addis (Arkivum Ltd.)
• Sam Gustman (USC Digital Repository and Shoah Foundation)
• Rob Hummel (Group 47, LLC.)
• Michael Moon (GISTICS Inc.)
• Kara van Malssen (AudioVisual Preservation Solutions)
• Mark Schubin (SMPTE Fellow)
• John Zubrzycki – conference chair (British Broadcasting Corporation)

The Early Bird Registration for the Screening the Future 2013 Conference has been extended until April 15. Don’t miss your last chance to benefit from this discount and register now at http://2013.screeningthefuture.com. For more information about the conference and registration please visit: http://2013.screeningthefuture.com

Changing Sceneries, Changing Roles: Part VI

The International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA)’s Media Management Commission organises an international seminar on metadata and it’s significance for digital AV-archiving on the 16th and 17th of May 2013 at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision  in Hilversum.

Since 1997, the Media Management Commission of FIAT-IFTA has organised a series of seminars for AV-documentalists, archive policy-advisers, middle management and staff. The main theme of these seminars is always: the consequences of the technological developments for the work of moving image and sound archivists. This year, the MMC dedicates its 6th Seminar in the serial Changing Sceneries, Changing Roles entirely to the phenomenon of metadata and its increased significance to access, collection management and the preservation of AV-collections.

In digital archiving, the concept of metadata is crucial. Only with the help of metadata can archives make their treasures accessible to users: metadata is capable of linking the contents of many different collections, forming a huge worldwide (or, in the case of EUscreen: European-wide) network of online sound and images. Ingesting, managing and preserving the rapidly growing amount of digital files in each individual archive would be impossible without the controlling power of standardised metadata.

Programme

The two days of the seminar will be divided into four sessions that each consist of a keynote address, two to three case studies/concrete projects and panel discussions. The four types of metadata developments that will be addressed in the four sessions are:

1. Automatically generated metadata (keynote: Cees Snoek , computer scientist at the University of Amsterdam who leads a research team working on the development of a smart search engine for digital video: the Media Mill Semantic Video Search Engine)
2. Linked (meta)data (keynote: Seth van Hooland, who holds the chair at the Digital Information and Communication Science Department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles)
3. Preservation metadata (keynote:  Rebecca Guenther, who works at the Library of Congress and is currently the worlds leading authority on Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies or PREMIS)
4. User-generated metadata (keynote: Lora Aroyo, associate professor Intelligent Information Systems at the Web and Media Department of  Computer Science at the VU University Amsterdam)

While the  keynote speakers will explore these areas, archive-practitioners from prestigious broadcasters and institutions will present how they collect, create and employ metadata in new and/or digital ways. Every session is evaluated by way of discussions between a variety of AV-experts, focusing on the professional impact of the presented views and developments.

More information

• Register for the FIAT/IFTA MMC Seminar on metadata at http://www.beeldengeluid.nl/MMCSeminar2013
• Download the  conference programme as a PDF or as an application for your tablet or smartphone.
• For questions about the programme or logistics, get in touch with the commission at: mmc2013@beeldengeluid.nl
• To read up on how the EUscreen project handles metadata interoperability between audiovisual archives in 19 countries, making use of the EBUcore metadata standard, you can consult the EUscreen Report on Semantic Interoperability with Europeana

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline for applications: February 28 ^th, 2013

In recent years, quite some progress towards a transnational point of view on historical processes and on contemporary developments has happened in the fields of television and sound studies – both finding shared theories, methodologies, and analytical tools, and identifying useful case studies and histories.

The conference Transnational Mediascapes: Sound and Vision in Europe will take place at the Department of Media and Performing Arts of the Catholic University of Milan on May 14^th-15^th, 2013. The conference is organised in association with Ce.R.T.A. – Centro di Ricerca sulla Televisione e gli Audiovisivi and ALMED – Alta Scuola in Media, Comunicazione e Spettacolo. Abstracts are invited for contributions to the two main topics of the conference:

Day 1: Transnational Television: Towards a Comparative TV History
Day 2: Transnational Soundscapes: Sound and the Media in Europe

Media studies have been forced by convergence, digitization and globalization to look beyond the traditional structure of national media systems, histories and habits, and to begin to analyse their phenomena according to a wider, and more complex, point of view. On one side, they have started to reconstruct the global flows of information and entertainment, the basis of a “mainstream culture” that unifies – at least partially – different geographical, political, social and cultural areas. On the other, they have begun to follow media products and trends in their complex paths across various countries and macro-regions, underlining both the differences and the deep similarities in shapes and meanings, in production processes as well as in consumption practices.

Day 1 – Transnational Television: Towards a Comparative TV History

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 14^th, 2013

Following the comparative approach to European television established by recent works as Jonathan Bignell and Andreas Fickers’ A European Television History (2008) and Jérôme Bourdon’s Du service public à la télé-réalité. Une histoire culturelle des télévisions européennes (2011), the focus on trans-nationality in television is one of the most compelling and current challenges for TV studies. If the medium is still deeply national in many aspects, in fact, digitization and globalization include TV into wider multi-national exchanges of ideas, formats, programmes, genres, trends, and also viewing practices.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Jérôme Bourdon (Tel Aviv University), John Ellis (Royal Holloway, London), Peppino Ortoleva (University of Turin). There will be also the presentation of the latest issues of View. Journal of European Television History and Culture and Comunicazioni sociali.

Abstracts are invited for contributions to the conference that seek to compare television histories, genres, trends, production, and distribution practices across different countries and regions, in Europe as well as in the rest of the world, offering a wide approach on methods, theories and case histories.

Topics can include:

• The (im)possibility of a transnational history of television;
• Definitions and methods for the comparative approach;
• Public Service Broadcasting, Commercial TV and Pay TV across different countries;
• Logics of broadcasting in different countries;
• Production practices in different countries;
• Scheduling practices in different countries;
• TV brands in different countries;
• Genre definitions and redefinition in different countries;
• Textual evolutions in different countries;
• Consumption practices in different countries;
• Transnational circulation of TV products;
• Production and consumption macro-areas (i.e. European Community, English-speaking countries);
• Original research findings on single case histories across two or more nations.

Scholars from all areas of TV and media studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions. Each speaker will have about 20 minutes of speaking time. Proposals (250 words, written in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by February 28 ^th. Submissions should be sent to Attilia Rebosio. Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than March 10 ^th.

Day 2 – Transnational Soundscapes: Sound and the Media in Europe

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 15^th, 2013

In post-WWII Europe, popular culture began to relate to a wide range of mediatized practices, at the centre of which the growing music industry essentially revolutionized the media- and soundscapes we live in. This already convergent network expressed a wider social change towards modernity, mobility, new gender relations, that could also be felt as a generational shift. For us today it seems likely to have been the place for the building of individual and collective life histories, allowing an interpretation in terms of personal and collective memories and cultural heritage.

In order to begin a reconceptualization of such cultural practices, we are in need of more information concerning the historical background, the modes of production and the industrial strategies, the textual and paratextual output and the patterns and ways of consumption that characterized the crucial encounter between audio-visual media and popular music, gathering different methodological perspectives as much as comparing different national or transnational trajectories.

As a consequence, the aim of this symposium is to explore from a comparative perspective, European popular culture in its crucial journey towards mediatization from 1945 to the Seventies, as an exemplary trajectory for its seemingly excessive foregrounding of music and sounds within the national film, radio and television cultures and the transnational mediascape. Topics of papers may include:

• popular music and media industry
• European Media industry vs American media industry
• amplification and high fidelity;
• audiovisual performance and the canonization of popular forms;
• national/transnational pop music and culture;
• popular music in film, radio and television;
• cross-media singers and performers
• stardom and fandom.

Confirmed keynote speakers are: Franco Fabbri (University of Turin), Andreas Fickers (Maastricht University), Wolfgang Mühl-Benninhaus (Humboldt Universität Berlin). Scholars from all areas of media and popular music studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions. Each speaker will have about 20 minutes of speaking time.

Proposals (max. 250 words, written in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by February 28 ^th. Submissions should be sent to Attilia Rebosio. Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than March 10 ^th.

1. Call for papers: Moving at Different Speeds

2. Call for papers: Media Innovations & Private Television Conference

IBBT-SMIT-VUB organizes the Second International Symposium on Media innovations and the Private Television Conference in cooperation with the University of Oslo (Norway) on April 18-19, 2013. 

The Media Innovations Symposium explores how changing technologies, and changing modes of usage and engagement with media bring about innovation and transformation of the media industry and its policy. The second day will be a co-organization with the Private Television Conference and will be dedicated to innovations in the television broadcasting industry.

Send your 750-word extended abstract to info@mediainnovations.be by 15 November 2012. Topics/sectors: innovating in formats; innovating in business models; innovating in delivery (trying to reach the consumer in new ways) ; innovating in consumption practices (new roles of users).  Abstract acceptance will be announced in December 2012. Full paper deadline March 1st , 2013. The best paper award will be announced during the conference.

3. Call for papers: ‘Waste’.

NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies #4, Autumn 2013  – Guest editors: Alexandra Schneider and Wanda Strauven

NECSUS is an international, open access, peer-reviewed journal of media studies published by Amsterdam University Press in partnership with NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). The journal is multidisciplinary and strives to bring together the best work in the field of media studies across the humanities and social sciences.
A special section of NECSUS will address the phenomenon of waste in the broad range of past and present media practices. We suggest to consider waste not only in terms of content or representation, but also and especially as a rhetoric, a method, or a strategy. At stake are issues such as the deterioration of film stock and VCR tapes, the future of dead media, the massive growth of electronic garbage, game consoles that can no longer be played due to the industry’s ‘planned obsolescence’, and the ephemerality of organic art. Waste is understood here in its multiple dimensions both as (everyday) matter and (conceptual) metaphor, as materiality and immateriality, as a socio-economical concern and artistic technique, and as repulsion and beauty.

Topics may include, but will not be limited to the (renewed) tradition of found footage; the archiving of bits and pieces; the aesthetics of decay; obsolete media devices; e-waste; biodegradable art works and installations; the display and concealment of waste in various media. NECSUS looks forward to receiving abstracts of 500 words and a short bio of no more than 150 words by 1 December 2012 at the following address: g.decuir@aup.nl. NECSUS also continues to accept a wide variety of abstracts for both full-length essays and short reviews that may not be related to a special section theme.

On September 28th, 2012 the Television Studies Commission of the International Federation of Television Archives, FIAT/IFTA, organised a one-day seminar at the British Film Institute in London. It was the second international television studies seminar organized by the TSC, after the first one took place in Paris at l’Institut National de l’ Audiovisuel in 2010. The seminar brought together television studies scholars and television archivists from around the world. In the year of the London Olympics, the morning session discussed the theme ‘Sport and the Olympics’.

Report by Dana Mustata, University of Groningen

Mette Charis Buchman presenting DR

Dr. Eggo Müller from Utrecht University opened the event with a keynote speech on the Mediatization of Sport. He discussed sport in relation to a process of mediatization, zooming in on the diverse logics of sport and media and how the two intertwine. Arguing that sports and its mediatisation are in fact two sides of the some coin, Eggo Müller pointed out that the sports spectator’s has an intrinsic longing for mediatisation that is attained through processes of identification, representation and contemplation. Mette Charis Buchman from Danmarks Radio Archives continued the series of talks on sport and television with a visual journey through Danish archival footage on the Olympics, accompanied by brief history of Danmarks Radio Archives.

The afternoon sessions presented academic papers based on research done in several FIAT/IFTA member archives. In the panel Media and Politics, Ken Griffin from the University of Ulster drew upon research carried out at Ireland’s National Television and Radio Broadcaster RTÉ to discuss RTÉ ‘s early cross-border cooperation with the Northern Irish broadcaster UTV. Concepción Cascajosa from Carlos III University of Madrid illustrated footage from the Spanish broadcaster RTVE and discussed images of the masses as a representation of change in the aftermath of Franco’s death. Berber Hagedoorn from Utrecht University exemplified how Dutch broadcast archival footage is used in today’s multi platform television to visualize the history of World War II for young audiences in the Netherlands.

The last panel of the day, British Perspectives, provided insights into different aspects of the history of British television. Elinor Groom from Nottingham University presented the findings of her research at the BFI Archives on the early history of ITV’s regional franchise Southern Television. Lisa Kerrigan from the British Film Institute (BFI) introduced lost footage of British television drama, which was recently rediscovered at the Library of Congress. Nathan Budzinski discussed the British television documentary tradition, zooming in specifically on the work of John Grierson. At the end of the day, Dana Mustata from the University of Groningen presented the open access journal VIEW. She spoke about the collaborative practices between academics and archivists on the journal and the ways in which the journal promotes innovative ways of writing television histories in a multi-media environment, allowing the integration of archival sources within academic articles.

The seminar enabled a bridge of dialogue between television scholars and television archives and encouraged fruitful exchanges between them. Several members of the European Television History Network and EUscreen were present at the event. The seminar was organized under the umbrella of the FIAT/IFTA World Conference, which also hosted a joint EUscreen and Europeana panel. In the panel, Johan Oomen from the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, David Smith from Europeana, Marco Rendina from Cinecittà Luce and Dana Mustata spoke about the accomplishments of EUscreen, offered a sneak preview into EUscreenXL and the future of online audiovisual archives and emphasized the value for television research of online audiovisual databases.

 Related posts

• Registration open for FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Seminar – 17 September 2012
• Archivists and Academics Coming Together at 1st FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Seminar – 28 May 2010
• FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Commission announces: The First FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Seminar - 08 December 2009 (VideoActive)