Media Archives Research Articles

Multimedia

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Colonialism, Collective Memory, and Memory Politics: Critical Reflections on Narratives and Public Archives of the Algerian War

Purpose: The article examines the trial of French General Paul Aussaresses (b. 1918, d. 2013) in the 2000s for war crimes committed during the Algerian War (1954 to 1962). Approach/Methodology/Design: A historiographical analysis covering topics such as colonialism, public memory, collective memory, counter-narratives, education, forgetting, and authenticity. Findings: Public history without individual memories or lived experiences of communities that have survived historical events can be viewed as inauthentic. It might even be called propaganda to present only state state-sanctioned accounts of historical events. Many governments will consequently enact laws to distinguish between what constitutes official national narratives—and what remains peripheral, or perhaps extremist individual, historical accounts. Practical Implications: This paper contributes to the scholarly literature examining oral testimonials in political and war crime tribunals, and the ethics of conducting public history research using media archives. Originality/value: Towards a greater understanding of collective memory processes, the case of the Algerian War reveals the constant negotiations, formal networks, and informal channels used to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources of historical memory—and the consequences on culture, law, and society.

Boxing-related fatalities in Australia: A retrospective analysis of news media reports

ObjectiveTo quantify and describe boxing-related deaths in Australia. DesignRetrospective analysis of news media reports of all boxing-related fatalities in Australia during 1832 to 2020. MethodsAustralia and New Zealand Newsstream, Factiva, Informit, Google News, Fairfax Media Archive, and Trove were searched from inception to December 31, 2020. News media articles reporting all-cause boxing-related mortality were included for analysis. ResultsThere were 163 boxing-related fatalities in Australia during 1832 to 2020, including 122 (74.8%) professional and 40 (24.5%) amateur athletes. The most common causes of death were traumatic brain injury (n = 121; 74.2%) and cardiac arrest (n = 11; 6.7%). Boxing-related deaths occurred most frequently during the decades from 1910 to 1930. The fatality rate remained relatively steady from the 1870s through the 1930s, and then declined precipitously until the 1980s. Since legislation to regulate boxing started being introduced in the mid-1970s, there were a total of eleven deaths, of which all but one were caused by traumatic brain injury. ConclusionsParticipation in boxing is associated with risk of death, in particular death caused by traumatic brain injury. The boxing-related fatality rate declined precipitously prior to government legislation to regulate boxing started being introduced, with no discernible further reduction in fatalities since. Given that a main purpose of government regulation of boxing is to protect the health and safety of athletes, the findings herein suggest that current regulations are either inadequate or not effectively implemented.

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Media Ops Industry Comments to SMPTE

The transition of the media industry to Internet Protocol (IP)-based networking protocols and workflows is well underway. Millions of users streaming audio and video daily believe that the transition and the hard work evolving to IP-based network transports is done and behind us, while the reality is that the revolution is far from over. Ongoing is the retooling of the entire content workflow of creation, editing, post-production, archiving, and delivery of professional media to leverage IP-based networks and protocols. This ongoing retooling handles networking situations and user demands that go well above the now seemingly mundane (but still surprisingly complex) task of reliably delivering prerecorded video on demand (VOD) content over well-behaved, reliable broadband that was seen as the “big” streaming challenge to achieve just a few years ago.

A method for space archaeology research: the International Space Station Archaeological Project

How does a ‘space culture’ emerge and evolve, and how can archaeologists study such a phenomenon? The International Space Station Archaeological Project seeks to analyse the social and cultural context of an assemblage relating to the human presence in space. Drawing on concepts from contemporary archaeology, the project pursues a unique perspective beyond sociological or ethnographical approaches. Semiotic analysis of material culture and proxemic analysis of embodied space can be achieved using NASA's archives of documentation, images, video and audio media. Here, the authors set out a method for the study of this evidence. Understanding how individuals and groups use material culture in space stations, from discrete objects to contextual relationships, promises to reveal intersections of identity, nationality and community.

Integrating cost and time metrics into media asset management workflows: Understanding the true cost of cloud storage for media archives

Metadata plays an important role in media asset management (MAM), powering access control, searchability and workflow automation. The more we know about our assets, the more efficient and usable our digital asset management (DAM) and MAM systems become. As cloud and operating-expense services have become more ubiquitous, it has become essential to understand time and cost implications and how they correlate to media workflow. This paper discusses the value of tracking cloud storage and egress metrics as metadata within DAM and MAM systems. By correlating these metrics against existing metadata, administrators are able to build total cost of ownership models, budget more effectively and enable a ‘chargeback’ usage model. These metrics also help to manage end users’ expectations more effectively within the MAM and storage ecosystem.

Producing Authenticity: Urban Youth Arts, Rogue Archives and Negotiating a Home for Social Justice

Social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found, especially for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies. Community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this context over the past three decades and are now part of the urban infrastructures that shape connected learning networks in highly industrialized nations. In this capacity, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, represent and make a home for children and youth. This paper examines how authenticity in youth culture and youth cultural expression is negotiated by arts organizations and how organizations locate their own trustworthiness as allies of young people through the curation of online media archives.
 The analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in Canada’s largest English-speaking cities. The Oasis Skateboard Factory (OSF) in Toronto, ON is an extension program of the Toronto District School Board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. ReelYouth (Vancouver, BC) started in Vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across Canada and internationally.The claims to youth authenticity articulated in each media archive reveal how authenticity and trust are negotiated ideologically by each organization and how organizations mark their ontological status, as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world.
 I examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each archive. Whilst showcasing how authenticity is negotiated by each group, I show how the production of authenticity discourses by OSF and ReelYouth simultaneously convey a deeper reality: the way youth arts groups operate as care structures (Scannell, 2014) that offer ontological security (Giddens, 1991), and places of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” (Frosh, 2019, p. 16) for youth. In this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of routing from which the work of social justice can be borne.

Social Media and Emergency Services: Information Sharing about Cases of Missing Persons in Rural Sweden

The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of information sharing in social media about missing persons by using social media data (mostly Twitter) and conventional media coverage (media archives), adopting a platial perspective to this geographical information. By focusing on the cases of three people gone missing, we report on ways in which civil society establishes relational networks through social media to collectively support local searches and share information in rural Sweden. Geographical information systems and visualization techniques underlie the methodology of this study. Findings show that the geography of information sharing in social media about a missing person is not random, revealing a globally dispersed pattern across the country. Information sharing contains more emotional than informational content, hitting a peak of spread after a person is found deceased. This finding indicates that the value of information shared by social media as a problem-solving resource might have so far been overestimated in the process of finding missing persons. In addition, tweets show indications that voluntary organizations constitute a valuable resource in rural contexts but not without impact on the existing networks of stakeholders delivering emergency services.

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

Cross-Media Alliances to Stop Disinformation: A Real Solution?

Social networks have surpassed their intermediary role and become gatekeepers of online content and traffic. This transformation has favored the spread of information disorders. The situation is especially alarming in Spain, where 57% of Spaniards have at some moment believed false news. Since 2016, First Draft has promoted several collaborative verification projects that brought together newsrooms to fact-check false, misleading and confusing claims circulating online during presidential elections in several countries. The main objective of this article is to study the collaboration forged between newsrooms in Spain in order to debunk disinformation contents in 2019 under the name of Comprobado (Verified) and the impact of this initiative. Applying a methodological approach based on non-participant observation, interviews, content analysis of reports, scientific articles, books and media archives, we examine the internal uses of this platform, how journalists verified public discourse, the strategies and internal agreements implemented, and the degree of participation of the 16 media involved. Results show that only half of the initiatives begun were transformed into published reports, and the media impact achieved was limited. Finally, we note that the principal reasons for the frustration of the project were its improvised implementation, due to the date of the election being brought forward, and the scant culture of collaboration in the sector. In Spain at least, cross-media alliances are still an exception.

A Review of Web-Based Tobacco Control Media Archives for Researchers and Practitioners.

Web-based resources for tobacco use prevention and control provide valuable tools for cancer education. This study sought to (a) identify existing websites that archive prevention and cessation media content and (b) characterize the content and features of those websites. We used a comprehensive search strategy to identify web-based resources. Websites were included if (1) the content was focused on tobacco; (2) a primary purpose of the website was to house a national or international historical archive of anti- or pro-tobacco media or communication content; and (3) the website was designed for researchers or practitioners. Of the 55 websites initially identified, N = 9 met criteria. All websites contained anti-tobacco media content (100%), although 56% also contained pro-tobacco content. Most websites focused on multiple tobacco products (89%), while 11% focused solely on cigarettes. The most common media content in the archives were print ads (67%), warning labels (56%), and video ads (33%). Most archives contained a search function or content filters (67%). While most websites provided free media content with no restrictions (78%), 22% contained paid or restricted content. Other website material included research reports (89%), newsfeeds (89%), fact sheets (67%), advocacy information (56%), and tools for practitioners (44%). This study provides a systematic summary of web-based tobacco prevention and control resources that archive communication and media content. The identified websites can assist researchers and practitioners in their tobacco control efforts, although additional archives focused specifically on vaping media and communication content are needed as the vaping epidemic among youth continues to intensify.

Digging for gold in the archive: Artificial intelligence is the treasure map

There is gold (or at least golden nuggets) in digital archives, and unlocking that value can provide the new revenue stream that media outlets are looking for. Deployed wisely, artificial intelligence (AI) can offer the solution — it can scale quickly, it can have little to no impact on legacy workflow, and it can provide a direct line to monetisation. As this paper discusses, however, there are certain issues that must be addressed first, not least the fact that most media archives contain literally hundreds of thousands of video, image and audio files, for which metadata standards have evolved over decades. Compounding this is the lake of unused first-party data. This paper shows how AI can be used to solve the metadata issues underlying the various files in an archive and unlock the hidden value in so-called long-tail content, with minimal impact to existing work, workers and workflow.

A comprehensive flood event specification and inventory: 1930–2020 Turkey case study

Flooding is one of the most frequent natural disasters that have significant impact on communities in terms of loss of life, direct and indirect economic losses, and disruption of daily life. Decision makers often depend on flood data inventories to make more informed decisions on the development of flood mitigation plans to protect flood prone communities. A comprehensive inventory that covers multiple aspects of a flood event is critical to identify vulnerable regions, historical trends, and mitigate possible flood impacts. This study proposes an integrated flood data specification to support multi-stakeholder use cases, community-based sustainable domain specific maintenance, and crowdsourced data collection and management. The specification is designed based on comprehensive review of existing global and national repositories, scientific studies and needs and requirements of stakeholders. The specification is designed to include metadata on environmental, economic, and demographic impact, hydraulic, hydrologic, and meteorological features, and detailed location information of a flood event. As a case study, a flood event inventory was compiled for Turkey between 1930 and 2020 using existing national and global data sources and digitized media archives. A total of 2101 flood events with 64 data attributes have been collected over the period of 90 years. An initial statistical analysis of the inventory is also presented for assessment of the seasonal and regional characteristics of flooding in Turkey.

‘Banner of an Atomic Regiment’: Morris Louis, Greenberg's Modernism, and Science, c. 1962

AbstractAround 1962, ‘formalism’ could indicate methodological purity in the realms of both art and science. With camps in both disciplines attempting to minimize human intervention in the realm of decision‐making, ‘formalism’ could take on mechanical overtones, thereby linking art and science in profound ways. This essay considers the ways in which the austere abstract paintings of Morris Louis from the years surrounding 1960 bring these dual formalisms into focus. When viewed through the criticism of Clement Greenberg and the near‐unwavering faith President Kennedy's administration placed in new technocratic ways of waging war, Louis's paintings can be seen as beatified expressions of a mechanical rationality that also brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Through deep engagement with Greenberg's criticism and media archives, the essay forges links between Greenberg's version of Louis and the dark sides of this rationality. The article concludes by locating ways to consider Louis's paintings outside of the Greenbergian straitjacket – recapturing the strangeness and chaotic nature of the painter's practice.

РОССИЯ И СТРАНЫ ЦЕНТРАЛЬНОЙ АЗИИ В МОЛОДЕЖНЫХ ОБМЕНАХ В РАМКАХ ШОС

Youth exchanges have become an essential component of people-to-people exchanges in international relations, both in bilateral and multilateral formats. This paper analyses the participation of Russia and its Central Asian partners (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) in youth exchanges in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The authors consequently discuss the institutional structure and formats of the multilateral cooperation, its development within the last decade, and the representation and role of the member states. The research is based on the study of the SCO multilateral documents, SCO institutions’ documentation, official addresses and interviews of the SCO politicians and NGO leaders, online news archives of NGOs and media. The authors conclude that the SCO has formed a multilateral cooperation mechanism for youth exchanges, in which Russia and Central Asia are fully represented, with minor exclusions. Meanwhile, the cooperation demonstrates the evident rivalry between Russia and China in this cooperation. The Central Asian countries have become subject to this rivalry, however, at the same time they have already started to put forward their own initiatives, too, which can be significant for the development of multilateral dialogue. Finally, the paper discusses the potential benefits of cooperation for its participants.

Cultural Exchanges between Russia and Turkmenistan: Structure, Dynamics, and Defining Features

Cultural exchanges are an essential component of humanitarian interaction between countries and societies, in particular, between political partners and neighboring states whose citizens regularly communicate with each other. This paper discusses cooperation in the area of cultural exchanges between the Russian Federation and one of its Central Asian neighbors the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. To date, cultural exchanges and humanitarian cooperation have received very little attention in Central Asian studies, despite the attention paid to Russian-Turkmen economic cooperation and policy aspects. This paper is aimed at illuminating the modes, factors, dynamics, and defining features of the Russia-Turkmenistan cooperation in the area of cultural exchanges over the recent decade. The notions “cultural exchanges”, “humanitarian cooperation”, and “cooperation in the area of cultural exchanges” are explored in Russian-Turkmen diplomatic documents and the legislation of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The author has studied such sources as diplomatic documents, interviews, newsletters of state institutions and non-governmental organizations, and news archives of Russian and Turkmen media.

BRICS GROUP AS AN ACTOR OF WORLD POLITICS

This paper analyzes the self-positioning of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in world politics. The author has studied BRICS multilateral documents, addressed to the rest of the world, from 2009 to 2019, the documents related to summits procedure, and the related news archives of the international mass media. By means of discourse analysis, the paper traces the collective view of the group on the international issues, the changes in the group’s self-representation, and the reasons for them. The author concludes that, in spite of legally being not an intergovernmental organization, but a forum, BRICS still has a joint and consolidated position on many international issues, which is being outlined in the group’s multilateral documents. Shared views cover such issues as the reform of international financial institutions, the reform of the United Nations Organization, the regional conflicts in Africa and in the Middle East, the need for increase in representation of the Global South in international financial institutions, the international struggle against terrorism and other security threats. In addition, since 2013, BRICS has carried out annual (except for 2019) joint meetings with non-BRICS countries during its summits. In 2013-2016, there were BRICS meetings with the representatives of the chair country’s region. In 2018, there were two meetings held: “BRICS plus” summit with the leading countries of the international institutions of the Global South, and “BRICS outreach” summit with regional leaders. In 2020, both formats were planned, too. Therefore, we can observe the group’s self-positioning as an actor of world politics, however, at the same time, this trend largely depends on the priorities of the chair country every year. Each of the member countries has its own view of the group, and each tries to fulfill its own needs. Probably, the group would be fully self-represented as a world politics actor, if the states’ foreign policies were more consolidated. Yet, they do not reach complete consensus, because of the divergent national interests. This research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant № 18-18-00236)

Evolution of Information Systems Starting from Bloomberg and Dow Jones

This article aims to give an overview and describe a new structure in the media system, namely, closed information systems (CIS). These include various data bases used for performing professional tasks in relation to media and information in business and public administration. CISs may be categorized as new media and hypermedia. Since CISs can aggregate information and media messages, they work simultaneously in both media and information markets. The key task of the study is to analyze the history and prerequisites of CIS emergence, starting from the first one, that of news agency Reuters. We made a systemic analysis of the content terminal Bloomberg of Bloomberg news agency, and the multimedia library Factiva of Dow Jones, which helped to identify their key typological features and target audience. One of their functions is being a blueprint of a professional eco-system. Other information systems with similar functions are studied and analyzed, namely, LexisNexis, a multimedia library of legal papers and mass media archives, and a business directory Dun&Bradstreet, as well as their functions, content, and professional utilization. The article also describes the work of data base publishers and brokers in the market. The author contrasts professional information systems called CIS with the open-access system Internet by their common functions, and points out some key differences in selecting, classifying and verifying content.

Cancer awareness in the general population varies with sex, age and media coverage: A population-based survey with focus on gynecologic cancers

ObjectivesThere is a need for more knowledge about the public awareness and attitudes towards gynecologic cancers. We employed a research-purpose population-based citizen panel to assess how often people recall gynecologic cancers compared to other cancer types and to explore the relative importance of different information channels in relaying cancer information. Study designWe conducted an online survey using the Norwegian Citizen Panel (n = 1441 respondents), exploring associations between demographic factors and frequency of mentioning specific cancer types. We also searched The Norwegian Media Archive to assess the media coverage of different cancer types. Factors affecting likelihood of mentioning different cancers were assessed by multivariate regression. ResultsOnly 41 % of respondents listed one or more cancers in female genital organs. Of the gynecological cancers, cervical cancer was most frequently mentioned (28 %), followed by ovarian (12 %) and endometrial cancer (11 %). Female responders were more likely to mention cervical (OR 2.47, 95 % CI 2.16–2.78) and ovarian cancer (OR 2.09, 95 % CI 1.60–2.58) than male responders, but not endometrial cancer. Family and friends who have had cancer (50 %) and different types of media coverage (41 %) were reported as the most common sources of cancer information. The three most frequently mentioned cancer types in our survey were breast (77 %), hematologic (76 %) and lung cancer (75 %), which also were the cancer types having most media coverage. ConclusionsGynecological cancers are less frequently mentioned by Norwegian citizens when compared to several other cancer types such as breast-, hematologic- and lung cancer. Sex and age are important factors that affect awareness of cancer types. Media is likely to play an important role in what cancer types the public recalls.

Managing masculinities. Doctors, men, and men’s partners facing male infertility in France and French-speaking Switzerland (c. 1890–1970)

ABSTRACT This article explores the involvement of doctors, men, and men’s partners in the clinical setting of male infertility in France and French-speaking Switzerland from the 1890s to the 1970s. Drawing from medical literature, press articles, media archives, and patient records, this paper questions the gendered construction of medical and patient work. It argues that in medical encounters, doctors, men, and men’s partners did not only engage with infertility but also with patients’ masculinities. The association between fertility and masculinity meant that men, but also doctors, were sometimes reluctant to explore the male factor of reproduction. Therefore, physicians elaborated specific strategies – such as referring to traits stereotypically associated with masculinity, attenuating fertility diagnoses or delegating information to men’s partners – to either include or dismiss men from the clinical setting, and to avoid harming their feelings of masculinity. In the meantime, women were made responsible for men’s reproductive health, reproducing a gendered division of reproductive work. This paper highlights partners’ work, such as consulting first, persuading their partners to undergo fertility exams, and mediating the relationship with physicians.