‘It’s like the space shuttle blows up every day’: Digital television heritage as memory of European crises in the age of information overload

Abstract

Television is a public mediator of what constitutes ‘crises’ in Europe. Audio-visual archives and researchers are facing new complexities and ‘information bubbles’ when telling stories and reusing televised materials. I reflect on these practices, among others, via a comparative case analysis of the EUscreen portal offering access to thousands of items of European audio-visual heritage. I question how practices of selection and curation can support comparative interpretations of such representations. This approach aims to understand and support (1) interpretations of digitized/digital audio-visual sources in the era of information overload; (2) user interaction with digital search technologies – especially researchers as platform users; and (3) contextualization for reuse of audio-visual texts. Support for cultural memory research is crucial as television’s audio-visual heritage can help us to recognize which cultural practices result in the production of specific texts in European societies, representing conditions of the multiple crises that European citizens are experiencing today.

NarDis: Narrativizing Disruptive Media Events with the Media Suite’s Exploratory Search Tools

“…Researchers aiming to analyse the representation of disruptive events would thus benefit from tools that offer explorations of different perspectives on such events. 3 The project uses a case study approach in order to understand how exploratory search and narrative formation relate by investigating how exploratory search tools can support media researchers' interpretations of 'disruptive' media events as narratives. 4 To make this more concrete, NarDis investigates media researchers' use of exploratory search tools and narrative formation around two specific disruptive events, namely the case studies of (1) the assassination of Dutch politician Fortuyn in 2002 and (2) the North Sea Flood of 1953.…”