THE STSI-SOAS INDONESIAN TELEVISION PROJECT

Abstract

The Balinese Television Project is a collaborative venture between STSI Denpasar and SOAS, starting in 1990, to record, document, preserve archivally, and transcribe important Balinese cultural television broadcasts for educational and research purposes. The project now has an archive of some 1,500 hours of selected broadcasts, and is supposed to be among the largest archives on non-Western television in the world. Although Indonesia has a very important, active, and rapidly changing television broadcasting network, which is central to its role as a developing Pacific Asian country, the social and cultural implications of television on people's lives have remained largely unstudied. Among the problems is a relative lack of materials and of research on contemporary mass media in Indonesia. Television companies have virtually no archival facilities. So the project began as a pilot scheme in Bali to preserve broadcasts of particular cultural and religious value from destruction, by recording, transcribing, and establishing an archive for the use of both Indonesian and foreign scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The aim was that archive should also form a basis for more extensive research into Indonesian media.