Challenging Television Historiography in an Analogue World

Challenging Television Historiography
in an Analogue World

Dana Mustata
Groningen University
The Netherlands
Lisbon, NECS, June 2012
Connected to:

Funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus programme www.euscreen.eu

The Digital and the Historian
Andreas Fickers, Towards a New Digital Historicism? Doing History in the Age of Abundance
Journal of European Television History and Culture, http://journal.euscreen.eu

'According to Roy Rosenzweig, one of the few historians who
has discussed and promoted the phenomenon of ‘digital
history’ since the 1990s, most of his fellow colleagues tend to
brush off discussions on digitization as ‘technical’ issues and
assume a professional division of responsibility: while
archivists have to deal with the problem of digitization of
sources as it touches the questions of conservation and
preservation, historians neglect these problems and focus on
the problem of authenticity and reliability. (Fickers, 2012)

Connected to: ‘Historians need to be thinking simultaneously about how to
research, write and teach in a world of unhead-of historical
abundance'…’ (Rosenzweig qtd. in Fickers, 2012)

Challenges of the Digital Turn for the Historian

- Lack of methodologies to interpret the
displaced source

- Lack of approaches to cope with the
questionable ‘authenticity’ of the online source

- The conservation of research practices that
Connected to:
are outdated for the new environment


The Analogue Historian in a Digital World?
User testing with TV researchers in Euscreen (focus group
meetings; face-to-face interviews; survey among the
European Television History Network) revealed that:

- Online sources are mostly used for illustration purposes

- Research practices take place outside the web
platforms/online AV collections and preferably through
archival institutions

- Most preferred online practices of TV historians include text-
Connected to: based practice: searching; accessing metadata; saving
search results; embedding


The paradox of abundance in the digital world

While media texts proliferate in an ever
growing abundance, the media text itself does
little to enhance television history research in
this age of abundance.

Never before has the media text been more
estranged from the principles of order and
origin, central to the historian’s pursuit for
Connected to: authenticity.


Television Historiography in the Digital World
Arguments:
1) The digital AV source becomes a ‘networked’*
object, that not only places the text in relation to
other texts, but which also makes visible the
agencies interacting in the construction of their
history

2) An anthropological approach’** to uses of
online AV material can provide useful insight into
what a digital television historiography may entail
• Latour (2005)
Connected to:
• Latour (1979; 1986), Couldry (2010)


Journey through curating a
European Television History…

Connected to:


Paper-prototyping

Connected to:


Wireframing

Connected to:


Connected to:


Researching

Connected to:


Narrating history

Connected to:


Anthropological approach to digital TV Historiography
Paraphrasing Nick Couldry (2010): What are historians
(individuals, groups, institutions) doing in relation to media in
digital contexts*?

A ‘practice aproach' to digital TV historiography would
decentralize the view on television as objects, texts,
apparatuses of perception or production processes and focus
instead on what historians, archivists are doing in relation to
online television sources.

Digital TV Historiography as a 'social construction’, an
interaction between different agencies (historians, archivists),
Connected to: working tools (the web) and access to specific theories
(histories) (Latour, 1979; 1986).


Starting from the the premise that the digital
environment becomes a platform where
different actors (historians, archivists, users,
etc.) interact with one another in producing
television history, the challenge of the
television historian in the digital age becomes a
deconstructive as much as an anthropological
one, so as to take account of and reflect on the
agencies involved in the construction of
historical narratives.
Connected to:


Practices of Doing Television History in EUscreen

Collaboration: across expertise fields, rather than disciplines

Connected to:


Translation: from descriptive to active language

Connected to:


Building bridges: the pro-active historian

Connected to:


Practices of television history in e.g. EUscreen
reveal that knowledge is constituted in different
spaces (delineated by expertise, language, and
professional attitudes).

Digital television history is best suited to what
Foucault (1969) advocated as a method of
discontinuity.

Connected to:


Doing Digital Television Historiography
The digital source becomes a ‘networked' object that stands in
relation to other online texts and allows for interactions between
historians, archivists, users, etc.

A self-reflexive anthropological approach to digital AV databases,
rather than attention to the text itself, becomes essential.

Historical knowledge in the digital environment is constituted in
different spaces of expertise, which decentralizes the
prioritization of temporality in digital historiography and lends
itself best to a 'method of discontinuity’.

Only after accounting for these different spaces of practice, can
Connected to:
the historian can go further into pursuing the historical context.


Challenging Television Historiography in an Analogue World

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (9)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (9)

Similar to Challenging Television Historiography in an Analogue World

Similar to Challenging Television Historiography in an Analogue World (20)

More from EUscreen

More from EUscreen (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Challenging Television Historiography in an Analogue World