Abstract
Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers - increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives. Retrieving audiovisual sources therefore requires an in-depth knowledge of how to find sources digitally. These storytelling practices intertwine search technologies with the user’s ideas and production cultures. This paper presents qualitative research insights into how media professionals search in digital archives to create (trans)medial narratives, and uses the notion of creative retrieval to unravel the dynamics of audiovisual narrative production. Creative retrieval combines ideas about the effects of media convergence on media content, theories about serendipitous information retrieval, and studies of creativity to argue that retrieval practices of media professionals who create audiovisual narratives are governed by organizational, technological and content affordances and constraints. The paper furthermore exemplifies the first stage of an ongoing research project in which a user-centered design approach guides open source self-learning search algorithm development to support creative retrieval.
Highlights
Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers – increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives (Huurnink, Hollink, & De Rijke, 2010)
The present paper focuses on the search and retrieval practices of professionals in terms of interactions of human and material agency to analyze the process of audiovisual narrative production
This paper argues that media professionals’ search to find useful-yet-unforeseen audiovisual materials for media texts can be referred to as creative retrieval, a practice which integrates serendipity, creative processes, and media convergence
Summary
Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers – increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives (Huurnink, Hollink, & De Rijke, 2010). Recent research shows that media professionals’ (re)use of digitally archived material is increasing, there is comparatively little research on how this group searches for and locates audiovisual material (Huurnink et al, 2010) To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents qualitative research insights into how media professionals search for and use digital material to create audiovisual narratives. The paper’s theoretical starting point is the recognition that understanding technology users is key to explain how media technologies gain shape and meaning (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003) This view informs the larger research efforts’ methodology: search-supporting algorithms are developed using a user-centered design approach. After describing the research methodology, the subsequent analysis focuses on how the involved media professionals search for material, how they use retrieved materials to create audiovisual narratives, and what this implies about how the process of searching for a story shapes the story
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