This paper examines a body of TV commissions made for BBC Television that formed components of the BBC Climate Chaos season (2006–2007). These commissions represent the first and, to date, only concerted attempt to address the issue of climate change with a range of approaches across a number of broadcast and online platforms within a public service broadcasting context across an extended season. The paper contributes to the task of balancing the relatively extensive body of research into news media coverage of climate change with that of longer form broadcast content. It examines these programmes as a particular moment in the history of broadcasting, lying on the threshold of a proliferating number of TV channels and the burgeoning growth of interactive digital and social media based forms of leisure and public engagement. It takes as its starting point Couldry's plea to make voice a key focus for the promotion of more democratic media spaces. Specifically, it examines this assertion in relation to calls for polyvocality and the need for new and expanded political spaces in relation to human‐induced climate change. The paper contributes to the developing geography of voice in relation to public understanding and debate of complex global issues. At the most practical level, it also assesses a body of innovations and experiments in content, tone and media mix in broadcast television commissions on climate change, and points to areas for future investment.
In this paper we are concerned with the capacity of digital media to enable publics to tell their own environmental stories using digital broadcast archives (DBAs). We consider how digital media afford different ways of telling stories in relation to digital media archives. Central to this discussion is our experience of writing e-books as part of the AHRC-funded project "Earth in Vision: BBC coverage of environmental change 1960-2010." The e-book format has been adopted in order to explore some of the possibilities for writing environmental history and politics using DBAs. K E Y W O R D S digital broadcast media archives, digital geographies, environmental history, narrative space 1 | INTRODUCTION This paper examines digital narrative spaces, following Elwood and Mitchell's (2015, p. 151) call to pay attention to the processes by which new digital media both shape and transform familiar communicative practices such as story-telling. It draws on our experience of making multimedia e-books to explore how this medium might afford and facilitate creating and sharing new environmental histories using digital archives. By combining text, video and audio clips with scanned documents, photos and images, e-books can be much more than the digital equivalents of paper books. For the purpose of writing historical narratives, e-book formats can give archive materials a multimedia context that helps to bring them alive. Compared with print, e-books also encourage the active reader/user by allowing a degree of discretion in terms of pace and choice of route through the content. This paper examines how the e-book format shaped our writing. It considers what this experience might contribute to thinking about digital narrative space and the potential pros and cons of writing e-books. | DIGITAL ARCHIVES AND ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLINGThe e-books discussed in this paper were made as part of the AHRC-funded project "Earth in Vision: BBC coverage of environmental change 1960-2010." The project explores the potential and significance of digital broadcast archives (DBAs) and associated tools as a resource for the making and debating of environmental histories in the context of imagining and planning for environmental futures (Smith et al., 2016). It is based on a case study of environment-related broadcasts drawn from over five decades of BBC archive material. The project focuses on the archive of environmental programming collected by the BBC since 1957; the start of International Geophysical Year, and a key date in the emergence of a global environmental imagination. It is informed by a pilot study, which selected, annotated and obtained limited use copyright clearance for around 100 programmes amounting to 50 hours of programming. Using this sample of programmes, the project has developed a series of workshops and engagement exercises with a variety of publics, including school and university students, adult learners, academics, journalists and documentary film-makers.---
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.