National Audiovisual Institute Research Articles

The Audiovisual Archive in an Era of Disinformation and Misinformation

Audiovisual archives should reflect on their mission and goals in an era of overwhelming computer power. Will they be able to make good use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to unlock archived materials? Should they and can they be an ally in combating misinformation and disinformation? As part of a larger project on data literacy for journalists and other media and creative industries professionals, archivists were questioned about the challenges facing audiovisual archives today. Rather than focus on the specific missions of either national or broadcaster’s archives, they focus on how the archive has an important role when it comes to the politics of representation in public debate and civil life. In convivial conversation they speak from their experience at the French National Audiovisual Institute INA, The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, the EBU Academy, the Spanish RTVE archive and WITNESS, a human rights non-profit organisation based the United States that supports activists in archiving and preserving their video.

From public to market use: a historical perspective on the changes in health data collection and use in France from 1930 to the present

PurposeThis study aims to understand the progressive marketization of health data collection and use, through a study of its historical development in France, from the 1930s to the present day.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected a set of legal, institutional, political and media data. These came from the INA (National Audiovisual Institute), the French national newspaper websites and the websites legifrance.gouv.fr and vie-publique.fr. The authors then conducted a thematic content analysis.FindingsThe study results highlight the changes in the health-care system related to the increased use of data in France over three major periods. The first period – 1930s to 1980s – is marked by the creation of the French social security system to collect large sets of data to better manager people’s health care. The second period – 1980s to 2000s – is characterized by the adoption and assimilation of tools to manage patient data through several national and European regulations. The last period – 2000s to the present – saw the introduction of measures in favor of the digitalization of health care, and consequently of data, in parallel with the advancement of digital technologies in general. The institutional dynamics in healthcare have evolved with the nature of the actors and their practices, in connection with new perceptions about health data.Originality/valueThis research sheds light on the historical transformation of health data collection and use in France, revealing the involvement of diverse stakeholders, the discourses driving data development and the need for regulation. It exposes the dual nature of health data collection and use, initially sanctioned by the state and public entities but later exploited for private interests.

Formatted Sound

Formatted Sound

Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Crowdsourcing Metadata for Audiovisual Cultural Heritage

This paper is based on a crowdsourcing project which was realised at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies of the University of Turku between the years 2013–2018. The idea was to develop a format through which long-term crowdsourcing could be integrated into the humanities curriculum. The project was realised in close cooperation with the National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI) in Finland. The aim was to help KAVI in developing its open database for Finnish cinema, Elonet, by engaging both graduate and postgraduate students in producing keywords, genre characterisations, plot summaries and other relevant fields of information for Finnish cinema. In total, the project produced metadata for 572 full-length films, both fiction films and long documentaries that had their theatre release between the years 1946 and 1985. The amount is substantial considering that, to date, around 1,600 full-length films have been released in Finland. At the same time, it produced a successful model for drawing on crowdsourcing in the classroom.

Paris and Nice terrorist attacks: Exploring Twitter and web archives

The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the very first days and even hours after the attacks, to a ‘real-time’ institutional archiving by the National Library of France ( Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF) and the National Audio-visual Institute ( Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Ina). The results amount to millions of archived tweets and URLs. This article seeks to highlight some of the most significant issues raised by these relatively unprecedented corpora, from collection to exploitation, from online stream of data to its mediation and re-composition. Indeed, web archiving practices in times of emergency and crises are significant, almost emblematic, loci to explore the human and technical agencies, and the complex temporalities, of ‘born-digital’ heritage. The cases examined here emphasize the way these ‘emergency collections’ challenge the perimeters and the very nature of web archives as part of our digital and societal heritage, and the guiding visions of its governance and mission. Finally, the present analysis underlines the need for a careful contextualization of the design process – both of original web pages or tweets and of their archived images – and of the tools deployed to collect, retrieve and analyse them.

INA – An Augmented TV

Abstract This paper describes the extraordinary tool available for the French, in the field of the preservation and provision of audiovisual archives (news, television, radio and Internet). Created in 1974, the National Audiovisual Institute (INA), a public service, was commissioned to collect from radio and television stations archives and programs broadcast by state radio and television for professionals. In a second phase, INA opened its collections to researchers and academics, and more recently, to the general public. INA has also built documentary and research tools. Therefore it can be said that the availability of this audiovisual heritage not only promotes the quality of research on the content of radio and television, but also that the possibility for citizens to consult – through the Internet – a part of these archives might modify the memorial heritage of our contemporaries.

Witkacy, Cocteau i inni. Amatorskie filmy Augusta Zamoyskiego

The article analyses the contents of a collection of more than one hundred amateur films made by the famed Polish sculptor August Zamoyski. This unique collection of 9.5 mm films of great archival value was recently transferred to Poland and is now held by the National Audiovisual Institute.

Data Management at the French National Audiovisual Institute (Ina)

The French National Audiovisual Institute has been responsible since 1974 for the preservation of the audiovisual heritage produced by national broadcasting corporation (or “Office de radio et television française”: ORTF, for French radio and television corporation). The massive digitalization of these collections in the 1990s, the native digital capture of 120 channels since 2001, the opening of a “general public” website in 2006, are some of the steps taken by the Institute to progressively take into account the digital technologies to benefit the audiovisual preservation. This proposal of presentation would provide an update on the evolution of our processing, concerning most specifically a multi-year project which aims, linked to a new big data policy, to harmonize descriptive metadata according to common thesaurus and to streamline production processes as well as to promote new uses of these contents within the Institute (partial automation of documentary processing by automatic detecting of quoted or represented entities (faces, names, …), automatic articulation of documentary and legal metadata, …), but also outside of the Institute (online access to open data, access to media by technical data mining, …).

In the Light of the Midnight Sun

In the Light of the Midnight Sun

The Collège de France: 1973, 1993, 2013

Marcel Bluwal made two documentaries on the College de France: the first in 1973 for the ORTF (former French broadcasting corporation), as part of a series of programmes called “Signe des temps”, broadcasted between 1972 and 1974; and the second produced in 1993 for the INA (National Audio-Visual Institute). These films captured professors, the audience, the staff, buildings, and surrounding streets, offering a wealth of information on the major periods of the institution’s history. Prof. P...

Probabilistic Self-Organizing Map for Clustering and Visualizing non-i.i.d Data

We present a generative approach to train a new probabilistic self-organizing map (PrSOMS) for dependent and nonidentically distributed data sets. Our model defines a low-dimensional manifold allowing friendly visualizations. To yield the topology preserving maps, our model has the SOM like learning behavior with the advantages of probabilistic models. This new paradigm uses hidden Markov models (HMM) formalism and introduces relationships between the states. This allows us to take advantage of all the known classical views associated to topographic map. The objective function optimization has a clear interpretation, which allows us to propose expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, based on the forward–backward algorithm, to train the model. We demonstrate our approach on two data sets: The real-world data issued from the "French National Audiovisual Institute" and handwriting data captured using a WACOM tablet.

Depozyty cyfrowe z prywatnych kolekcji jako sposób wzbogacania zasobów bibliotek cyfrowych i ochrony dziedzictwa kulturowego

Teza/cel artykułu – Celem artykułu jest zwrócenie uwagi na potrzebę włączania do kolekcji bibliotek cyfrowych zdigitalizowanych prywatnych zbiorów bibliofilskich oraz ocena udziału tego rodzaju materiałów w zasobach polskich bibliotek cyfrowych. Metody badań – Na podstawie przeglądu materiałów informacyjnych opublikowanych na stronach internetowych bibliotek cyfrowych, Narodowego Archiwum Cyfrowego, Narodowego Instytutu Audiowizualnego oraz miejskich portali informacyjnych, prasy lokalnej publikowanej w Internecie itp. podjęto próbę oceny stopnia zainteresowania digitalizacją prywatnych kolekcji bibliofilskich wśród twórców bibliotek cyfrowych. Udział cyfrowych depozytów prywatnych kolekcji bibliofilskich w polskich bibliotekach cyfrowych zanalizowano na podstawie wyników badania ankietowego przeprowadzonego w lutym 2012 r. wśród bibliotek zrzeszonych w Federacji Bibliotek Cyfrowych. Badania obejmowały ocenę liczby zasobów cyfrowych pozyskanych ze zbiorów prywatnych, rodzaju zasobów uzyskanych z tego źródła oraz zasad współpracy z prywatnymi właścicielami. Wyniki – Stwierdzono, że obiekty znajdujące się w większości bibliotek cyfrowych to w przeważającej mierze zabytkowe i współczesne materiały biblioteczne, natomiast zbiory prywatne praktycznie wykluczone są z listy źródeł, z których pozyskiwane są zasoby cyfrowe. Dotyczy to zwłaszcza uczelnianych bibliotek cyfrowych funkcjonujących w oparciu o biblioteki tradycyjne czy cyfrowych repozytoriów związanych z różnymi instytucjami. Zbiory prywatne stanowią bardzo znikomą część opublikowanych w tych bibliotekach materiałów. Największą ilość zbiorów prywatnych zeskanowała dotąd Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa – ok. 3 tys. publikacji (2% wszystkich zbiorów). Inaczej wygląda sytuacja w bibliotekach cyfrowych ukierunkowanych na specyficzne księgozbiory, gromadzących regionalia, materiały dotyczące określonej dziedziny wiedzy, grupy kulturowej, instytucji, osoby, itd., takich jak np.: Biblioteka Multimedialna Ośrodka „Brama Grodzka” – Teatr NN, Wirtualne Archiwum Polskich Ormian czy Ziemiańska Biblioteka Cyfrowa zawierająca głównie elektroniczne reprodukcje czasopisma Wiadomości Ziemiańskie, której 100% zasobów (ok. 2 tys. skanów) pochodzi z prywatnych kolekcji. Dla tych bibliotek kolekcje bibliofilskie są bardzo istotnym źródłem pozyskiwania zbiorów, dlatego czynią one starania o ich pozyskanie. Wnioski – Nie ma w polskich bibliotekach cyfrowych zwyczaju tworzenia depozytów cyfrowych bez równoczesnego gromadzenia oryginałów. Tymczasem pozyskiwanie kolekcji bibliofilskich to znakomity sposób zarówno wzbogacania bibliotek cyfrowych o niezwykle cenne, nierzadko unikatowe druki, jak również zabezpieczania dzieł stanowiących dziedzictwo kulturowe.