Transnational Television History: A Comparative Approach

Fickers, Andreas; Johnson, Catherine

doi:10.1080/13688800903395411

Cited by 29 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Digitization has made comparative studies across borders and the linking of historical datasets possible (De Boer et al, 2015;Müller et al, 2014;Van den Akker et al, 2011). Whilst collaborative studies (Bignell and Fickers, 2008;Fickers and Johnson, 2010;Bourdon and Hagedoorn, 2013) are very much to be encouraged, researchers usually 'stick' to their own national paradigm. In this essay, I position myself as a media and culture studies researcher in different national contexts in Europe, using digital technologies to aid the analysis of a more complex dataset (Fickers, 2012;Meuzelaar, 2014;Rogers, 2013) of digitized audio-visual sources.…”

Section: Navigating Information Bubbles: Curated Memory In the Digitamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Hagedoorn

2019

Journal of European Studies

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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.

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Section: Navigating Information Bubbles: Curated Memory In the Digitamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Hagedoorn

2019

Journal of European Studies

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“…Furthermore, "transnational flows and transfers take place not only across institutions and through the movement of people and programmes, but also within the production and aesthetics of programmes themselves." 24 The French-Spanish axis in the broadcasting of football games is an exemplifying instance of this kind of practice.…”

Section: A C H a N G E O F A E S T H E T I C S : M O D E R N A E S T mentioning

confidence: 99%

Canal + Spain and Live Football Broadcasts

Ortega

Santos

2017

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In 1988 the Law for Private Television Broadcasting was approved by Spanish parliament. Three licenses were initially awarded. Soon thereafter, in 1990, three channels started broadcasting: Antena 3, Berlusconi-related Tele 5 and, against all odds, a pay channel, Canal + Spain. This article focuses on sports programming in the beginning of Canal + Spain. First, it offers an account of the Spanish television landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then, it scrutinizes the arrival of private television within the Spanish mediascape, examining thus the launching of Canal + by paying attention to the specificity of the Spanish audiovisual market. At the same time, it explores the transnational circulation of formats and professionals across Europe, especially in connection with the French Canal +, since it was a central element of the Spanish channel’s implementation. Second, it analyzes the types of live sports broadcasts as well as other sports programming such as talk shows in Canal + during the early 1990s in order to account for their importance in creating a unique kind of product designed to appeal to potential subscribers. More specifically, we will argue that live football broadcasts did not only attempt to establish a clear demarcation with the old-fashioned image and soundscapes of traditional television but also aimed at culturally appealing to a urbanite, cultivated spectator, precisely the type of viewer Canal + tried to recruit in its early days. Therefore, we will discuss how technological excellence and spectacle became tools for the expression of specific cultural values.

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“…However, before we venture further into the questions of metadata, let us briefly consider the case of transparent 'research questions' and 'research design' in relation to transnational media history. De Leeuw and Fickers both praise digitalization as something that fundamentally changed our possibilities for doing transnational history (De Leeuw, 2012; Fickers and Johnson, 2010). It is, of course, easier to gain access to sources from a computer than to travel to an archive or have sources brought to you through an interlibrary loan.…”

Section: The Impact Of the Online Archive Reexaminedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing media history in a digital age: change and continuity in historiographical practices

Jensen

2015

Media, Culture & Society

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This article explores the challenges which digital media brings into the field of media history. It starts out by examining prominent television historians' understanding of digital archives as revolutionizing media historiography. These claims are examined by holding them up against texts that discuss wider issues in historiographical practices related to television history and transnational comparisons. This investigation is paired with my own experiences and the many methodological challenges I have encountered using digitalized sources for my new research. I end up concluding that digital archives in themselves make little difference to scholarly media history. In light of the lacking impact, I argue that we should study the cultural economy of these archives to better understand the corporate, political, and economical structures that govern their content and which also set the course for online digital processes that are active history-producing entities themselves. Keywords: archive digital media media history social memory television transnational I took my first steps into the field of television history in 2006. This was the middle of a decade in which European broadcasting corporations began to share their audiovisual collections with the public via digital archives. For my first project, however, I never had the chance to use a digital archive as, in the end, nothing I wanted to see was digitalized. Returning to the field almost a decade later, things seem to be quite different: the archives of several European broadcasting corporations can be accessed online, and we have the digital, online pan-European television archive 'EUscreen'. Institutionally, it seems there has been a massive effort to make audiovisual material available to the wider public in digital archives. Parallel to this process, blogs, wikis, and other sites with user-generated content are increasingly places where material for research projects can be found. In the process of looking for data, the wealth of written online material is only outshined by the abundance of clips on YouTube and similar sites. With these new contributions to media history, it looks like digital media has come to play a significant historiographical role. However, what appears to be an age where digitalization is revolutionizing media history, and an Internet connection is all one needs to collect data, is also a time that brings media historians face to face with new ethical and methodological problems. Investigating these problems on the basis of personal experience, this piece explores a set of challenges new digital media brings into media history.

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Transnational Television History: A Comparative Approach

Cited by 29 publications

References 6 publications

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

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

Canal + Spain and Live Football Broadcasts

Doing media history in a digital age: change and continuity in historiographical practices

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