Video Archives Research Articles

Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America by Benjamin M. Han

Reviewed by: Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America by Benjamin M. Han Victor Wu (bio) Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America, by Benjamin M. Han. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 216 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-9788-0383-1. Benjamin M. Han’s debut book, Beyond the Black and White TV, reexamines the oft-overlooked roles of Asian and Latin American ethnic entertainers in American television against the backdrop of the cultural Cold War. Because the Asia-Pacific and Latin America were two critical geopolitical spaces for the expansion of US hegemony, Han argues that the transnational circulation of Asian and Latin American performers on US commercial television functioned as Cold War cultural diplomacy that promoted American internationalism and waged ideological battles against the encroaching threat of communism in those regions. Han draws upon Marxist philosopher Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle as a “false representation of reality through the mass dissemination of images” (7) to postulate that the “ethnic spectacle” mediated by Cold War– era television fabricated a narrative of the United States as being a bastion of racial equality and democracy. Han asserts that this narrative was birthed in direct response to Soviet criticism of its anti-Black racism, which was growing increasingly visible due to the civil rights movement and was damaging the nation’s image on a global scale. Beyond the Black and White TV specifically examines the variety show as a site of transnational cultural interventionism that was informed by a “triangulation among Cold War geopolitics, globalism, and U.S. racial logics” (19). Because the variety show “functioned as both education and entertainment” (4), it was uniquely suited for America’s rebranding efforts. Variety shows often featured white hosts, who served as cultural interlocuters that interviewed ethnic entertainers about their backgrounds and sang American popular songs alongside them. This emphasis on international understanding, along with the surge of Asian and Latin American performers beginning in the early 1950s, allowed the variety show to project a false image of America as an antiracist nation. While variety show broadcasts initially only targeted domestic audiences and American military personnel abroad, Han shows how these broadcasts served as an “early itineration of global television” (19) that in the late 1950s provided [End Page 345] the blueprint for the dissemination of American Cold War narratives through transnational networks. The book is split into four modular chapters detailing four geographically separate yet unexpectedly analogous spaces where television played a significant role in America’s political agenda during the Cold War: Las Vegas, Korea, Cuba, and Hawaii. Han uses a wide range of historical materials such as television archives and oral histories to trace the development of television as well as the careers of ethnic performers such as the Kim Sisters, the De Castro Sisters, Alfred Apaka, and Don Ho. He examines not just the contexts of their careers but also the contents of their performances, interrogating the ways in which they contested and reinforced investment in whiteness. Chapter 1 looks at Las Vegas as a culturally and militarily significant locus during the Cold War. One of the earliest televised broadcasts of Las Vegas was of the atomic bomb testing on Yucca Flat in 1951, which served as Las Vegas’s introduction to the American public imaginary as a city crucial to national security. This was a far cry from Sin City’s previous negative association with crime, and entertainment personalities saw television as an opportunity to clean up the city’s image and promote American internationalism. Han posits that the later influx of Asian and Latin American entertainers in the 1950s to the Las Vegas nightlife and television scene was part of an attempt to portray the city as an integrated, family-friendly destination. And by the late 1970s, entertainment personalities were using television to capitalize on ethnic spectacle in order to “shed previous depictions of Las Vegas” (37). Consequently, the American government used these televisual images to show off Las Vegas as a racially integrated city that “was representative of American ideals and values” (33). Han explores how...

Embedded Archives: Video Evidence and Database Memory of War in Syria

This article is the first of its kind to critically assess the Syrian Archive, a born-digital video archive that preserves footage of war and political violence. It does so with an eye toward classical archival theory, contemporary geopolitics, and theories of representation in documentary cinema. It also analyzes nonfiction moving images as objects gathered and mobilized for imperialism, examining the use of violent and abject images within databases as a very particular discourse of power. It contrasts the approach taken by the Syrian Archive with bak.ma, a video database that emerged out of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. As a theoretical intervention, this article suggests that moving image archives produced, preserved, and purveyed through recent forms of online activism will become increasingly central within archival studies.

Vehicle License Plate Detector in Compressed Domain

Data compression techniques allow data size to be reduced prior to data transmission and involve decompression upon transfer. This study shows for the first time that license plate (LP) detection can be accomplished without full decompression of the encoded data. Therefore, by determining in advance which images are required for LP recognition, computational costs of the system can be reduced. The proposed approach is realized on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) based compressed video sequences. Two methods are provided that generate images from HEVC attributes. Fully decoded pixel domain images are also generated for comparative purposes from the same encoded data. The YOLO V3 Tiny Object Detector is used in order to detect LPs in the generated images. EnglishLP, a public dataset, is used to interpret the findings in terms of speed and precision and for comparison with previous studies. An additional contribution of the paper is that a new compressed domain LP database has been created and made publicly available, comprising images captured by a commercial license plate recognition system. Using at least two-orders-of-magnitude less amount of data, the proposed compressed domain LP detector achieved similar precision and recall values to those of the state-of-the-art LP detection schemes tested on both datasets. Moreover, the proposed method results in more than 30% saving in inference time. The results suggest that the proposed method can be utilized for rapid video archive searching applications.

Passing It Forward: Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk

Passing It ForwardBlack and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk Juan Battle (bio) In this moment of racial reckoning throughout the united States, how are the voices of older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals being captured and stored? While large collections of archives exist curating LGBTQ+ local, regional, and national artifacts, far too few of those collections are digitized, fewer are one-on-one interviews (where respondents are allowed to be heard in their own words), and even fewer are one-on-one interviews with older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals. This project—Passing It Forward—seeks to fill that gap by conducting 150 one-on-one interviews, via Zoom, from January 2021 thru June 2021, with this very unique population. The interview protocol gathered information about the respondents’ background, professional and political activism, as well as their insights on prescribing a more inclusive future for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and their intersections. Within this collection of papers, some of the undergraduate and graduate students who collected the data then wrote these articles exploring a plethora of research questions. Because the researchers tended to be one— or two, and sometimes three—generations younger than the person they interviewed, this project will provide a venue to allow these changemakers to educate and inspire. So then, how do racial and sexual orientation identity enhance or inhibit the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) changemakers? For this target population, three specific areas were investigated: (a) their personal life history; (b) their ‘activism’ life histories, and how their personal life histories are interconnected with their activism life histories; (c) their perspectives on current topics versus historical ones; for [End Page 1] example, what are the similarities and differences between the resources and responses to Covid-19 in 2020 versus HIV/AIDS in the 1980s? Simmel (1955), a pioneer in research on identities, developed the idea of “crosscutting social circles.” Blau & Schwartz (1984) expanded Simmel’s work and argued that membership in multiple identity-based groups could be a positive attribute (allowing access to more people) or a negative one (when differences are consolidated). Early work on how individuals navigate the space between means, goals, and social structure (see Merton 1949/1968) highlights the ongoing struggle between changing identities and cultural expectations. Though multiple roles can create opportunities (Coser 1975 & 1991; Lifton 1993); other researchers—primarily Black feminists—have argued that multiple roles can serve as interlocking systems of oppression (Collins 1990 & 2003; Crenshaw 1989 & 1991). Subsequently, a new generation of scholars have expanded upon the work of these feminists and have explored the “intersectional imagination,” a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individual-and group-level oppressions based on identity (Pastrana, 2006) and their interaction with social structures. More recently, scholars have applied these theories to transborder constructions of racial and cultural hierarchies (Patil, 2013). Central to producing as well as impacting research, policy, and evidencebased knowledge is examining how issues that affect the broader population of people in the U.S. (i.e. healthcare, language proficiency, immigration, and reproductive health—just to name a few) continue to disproportionately affect populations who live at the intersection of non-normative identities, like people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender populations. In sum, longstanding and central to research being conducted by sociologists are issues of identity—including racial (Frazier 1939), sexuality (Foucault 1990), and their intersections (Collins 1990 & 2004; Crenshaw 1989). Documenting and dissecting those identities can be uniquely done via video archives of one-on-one interviews. The interview structure notwithstanding, in terms of archives focusing on LGBTQ+ populations, one of the largest collections located at a university is the one at the University of Southern California. As their website boasts: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning (LGBTQ) organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. [End Page 2] Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records and personal papers. However, unfortunately, only a small subset of this material has...

16] 組織内映像アーカイブのためのメタデータ構築：中部大学放送研究会番組映像の保存と利活用

16] 組織内映像アーカイブのためのメタデータ構築：中部大学放送研究会番組映像の保存と利活用

(Re)Mediating Holocaust Survivor Testimony

As the number of Holocaust survivors declines, their live eyewitness testimony will be preserved and communicated via other media. This transformation prompts a key question. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience? The response addresses three types of mediated testimony: the first televised broadcast of a Holocaust survivor’s story, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life; archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies gathered by the author that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and fostering understanding.

Training Beginners and Experienced Drivers using mobile-based Virtual and Augmented Reality

A developed by authors application for real-time visualization of augmented and virtual reality is considered, which enables to simulate the traffic accidents on a mobile platform with the Android operating system. The application is developed on the basis of the Unity 3D and is able to visualize various types of road accidents and also link them to a terrain, different conditions of the urban environment, and map of the accident statistics. The system has an archive of videos for the accident 3D-scenes. The application interface and implementation features are considered. The subsystems of virtual and augmented reality are described in detail with examples. This application may be used to train novice drivers, learn the rules of the road, and inform experienced drivers about new road junctions. In the system environment, the distribution of the number of traffic violations depending on the driving experience for three groups (no experience, less than 3 years, more than 3 years) was investigated. The study of the usefulness of the system on the Likert scale on 80 cadets of driving schools is presented.

Hysteroscopic Intact Removal of Angular and Caesarean Scar Pregnancy: A Novel and Markedly Less Invasive Surgical Treatment

Introduction: Ectopic pregnancy is the most common cause of mortality during the first trimester of pregnancy, and intrauterine ectopic pregnancies show significantly higher morbidity and mortality than extrauterine ones. Despite being less invasive, safety and effectiveness of the hysteroscopic treatment are still unclear. Moreover, such approach is not standardized. We aimed to evaluate safety and effectiveness of hysteroscopic intact removal of angular or cesarean section scar pregnancies, defining a novel and markedly less invasive hysteroscopic technique with a 5-mm Bettocchi hysteroscope or a 3.5-mm Versascope hysteroscope. Materials and Methods: Medical records and video archives were reviewed for all the patients with angular or caesarean scar pregnancies treated with hysteroscopic intact removal technique from January 2000 to December 2018 at our Department. Success and complication rates were assessed. Results: Four patients with angular (n = 1) or cesarean scar pregnancy (n = 3) met inclusion criteria. Case #1 was treated with bipolar resectoscope, cases #2 and #3 with 5-mm Bettocchi hysteroscope, and case #4 with 3.5-mm Versascope hysteroscope. Cases #2–4 did not require cervical dilatation. Before hysteroscopic treatment, cases #2–4 underwent unsuccessful medical therapy with multiple-dose methotrexate. Hysteroscopic treatment success rate was 100%, while complication rate was 0%. All patients were treated with a novel technique: hysteroscopic intact removal of angular or cesarean scar pregnancies. Such technique was described step-by-step. Conclusions: Hysteroscopic treatment of angular and cesarean scar pregnancies may be a safe and effective minimally invasive option. The novel technique of hysteroscopic intact removal technique may allow a markedly less invasive approach.

Emotion Co-Regulation Among Mother-Preschooler Dyads Completing the Strange Situation: Relations to Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms

Emotion co-regulation between parents and children has recently emerged as a powerful correlate of children’s psychosocial adjustment. However, most studies on this topic have focused exclusively on parents’ responses to children’s negative emotion displays. The current study employed a dynamic systems approach (State Space Grid) to mothers’ moment-by-moment positive and negative emotion co-regulation with their preschoolers prior to and following a stressor to the relationship (a separation within a standardized paradigm, the Strange Situation Procedure [SSP]). This study combined newly coded behavioral data from video archives of the 36-month SSP with secondary data from one site of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. There were 80 mother–child dyads in the study with the majority of mothers being Caucasian (81.3%), married (72.7%), and having a college education or higher (78.9%). Hierarchical regressions were conducted to test the predictors of 36-month positive/negative emotion co-regulation and its relationships with children’s 54-month internalizing and externalizing symptoms after adjusting for covariates in this longitudinal study. The results revealed that 24-month infant attachment security predicted higher 36-month positive and lower negative emotion co-regulation following the separation. Further, children in dyads with higher post-separation positive co-regulation and lower negative emotion co-regulation at 36 months had lower internalizing symptoms at 54 months. Lastly, 36-month post-separation positive/negative emotion co-regulation mediated the relationship between 24-month infant attachment security and internalizing symptoms at 54 months. The results highlight the unique contribution of positive/negative emotion co-regulation following stress for children’s adjustment.

On machine vision and photographic imagination

In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” (2018) as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how deep learning machine vision relies on photography, its technical regimes and epistemic advantages, and we propose a novel way to identify the latent camera through which the BBC archive was seen by machine.

From Songfilms to Telecomics: Vallée Video and the New Market for Postwar Animation

From 1948–1952, Rudy Vallée, a successful performer whose career spanned radio, film, recorded music and stage entertainment, expanded his operations into the burgeoning US television market with the launch of his independent production company, Vallée Video. One of hundreds of forgotten companies that arose during this period to meet growing demand for programming content, Vallée Video offers an important case study for understanding animation workers’ role in postwar television production. Drawing on corporate records and films preserved in the Rudy Vallée Papers at California’s Thousand Oaks Library and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the authors’ analysis documents Vallée’s use of freelance artists and external animation houses for work ranging from camera effects for illustrated musical shorts to animated commercials and original cartoon series. These productions demonstrate the fluid movement of animation labor from theatrical film to small screen markets and participated in larger aesthetic shifts toward minimalist drawing styles and limited character animation that would soon dominate mid-20th century US television.

Tamper-Proofing Video With Hierarchical Attention Autoencoder Hashing on Blockchain

We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we introduce a novel deep network architecture using a hierarchical attention autoencoder (HAAE) to compute temporal content hashes (TCHs) from minutes or hour-long audio-visual streams. Our TCHs are sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering). The focus of our self-supervised HAAE is to guard against content modification such as frame truncation or corruption but ensure invariance against format shift ( i.e. codec change). This is necessary due to the curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of the United Kingdom, United States of America, Estonia, Australia and Norway participated.

Videoscope-Assisted Cleft Palate Surgery: Rationale, Experience, and Technical Implementation.

Limited visibility characteristic of cleft palate repair presents both ergonomic and educational challenges to cleft surgeons. Despite widespread recognition and reporting, posture-related spine disorders continue to represent a significant and potentially career-limiting problem for cleft/craniofacial surgeons. In addition, education and participation during palate repairs is difficult because of visual field constraints. At the authors' institution, a novel videoscope system was designed and implemented to (1) provide visualization for all surgical team members during palate operations, (2) facilitate active resident education, and (3) improve surgeon ergonomics. The authors' prior report demonstrated proof of concept for this method, which is now used in all cleft palate operations at their center. The purpose of this report is to share the detailed methodology to facilitate implementation by others and a retrospective review of the authors' experience before and after implementation. Video demonstration of the videoscope setup and a representative, recorded case are provided. The use of the videoscope was feasible in palatoplasties regardless of palatal phenotype and repair technique and did not have an effect on operative time. Subjectively, the authors report reduced procedure time in cervical flexion and subjectively improved musculoskeletal strain associated with videoscope use. Importantly, use of this system also provided complete visualization for all operating room team members and enabled enhanced resident autonomy during palate operations. Finally, it has facilitated the creation and archive of high-definition educational videos with unparalleled perspective. The equipment required to implement the system is likely already available in many medical centers. Adoption of this system may provide an opportunity to improve posture and teaching capabilities for cleft surgeons. CLINICAL QUESTION/LEVEL OF EVIDENCE:: Therapeutic, III.

An automated approach to retrieve lecture videos using context based semantic features and deep learning

Video digitization is one of the emerging technologies holding significant importance over years in applications like video recording and video compression. There are different techniques available in the literature for the effective retrieval of videos. This research work presents a video retrieval scheme based on a deep learning strategy. Initially, the video archive is subjected to the keyframe extraction, for extracting useful keyframes from the video. The features extracted from the keyframes are stored in the feature database. The features are clustered using the Fuzzy C Means (FCM) algorithm. These clustered features have been provided to the deep learner for finding the optimal centroid for the incoming user query. For experimentation, the research has considered videos from different categories, and both the text query and the video query have been used for the retrieval. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed deep learning strategy in video retrieval and its achievement of improved values of 0.9620, 0.9682, and 0.9652 respectively for recall, precision, and F-measure.

Holocaust Testimonies: Problems Analyzed, Promises Fulfilled

ABSTRACT This article traces the evolution of Lawrence L. Langer’s career beginning as a professor of American literature followed by his transition to Holocaust literature, and eventual recognition and stature as one of the world’s foremost scholars of Holocaust literature and Holocaust video testimonies. His expertise in Holocaust art, media, and history is included. The parallel history of the founding, growth, and development of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is examined. The resulting symbiosis between Langer and the Fortunoff Video Archive, as well as the influences and contributions of both to the field of Holocaust studies is discussed.

Nelson Sullivan's Video Memories: YouTube Nostalgia and the Queer Archive Effect

This article argues that Nelson Sullivan’s video archive on YouTube reveals a “queer archive effect” on streaming platforms today. Through the nostalgic pull of witnessing everyday life in the 1980...

Machine learning analysis of perovskite oxides grown by molecular beam epitaxy

Reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) is a ubiquitous in situ molecular beam epitaxial (MBE) characterization tool. Although RHEED can be a powerful means for crystal surface structure determination, it is often used as a static qualitative surface characterization method at discrete intervals during a growth. A full analysis of RHEED data collected during the entirety of MBE growths is made possible using principle component analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering to examine significant boundaries that occur in the temporal clusters grouped from RHEED data and identify statistically significant patterns. This process is applied to data from homoepitaxial SrTiO$_{3}$ growths, heteroepitaxial SrTiO$_{3}$ grown on scandate substrates, BaSnO$_{3}$ films grown on SrTiO$_{3}$ substrates, and LaNiO$_{3}$ films grown on LaAlO$_{3}$ substrates. This analysis may provide additional insights into the surface evolution and transitions in growth modes at precise times and depths during growth, and that video archival of an entire RHEED image sequence may be able to provide more insight and control over growth processes and film quality.

Arthroscopic classification of intra-articular hip pathology demonstrates at best moderate interrater reliability.

The purpose of this study was to report several novel classification systems for intra-articular lesions observed during hip arthroscopy, and to quantify the interrater reliability of both these novel systems and existing classifications of intra-articular lesions when tested by a group of high-volume hip arthroscopists. Five hip arthroscopists deliberated over shortcomings in current classification systems and developed several novel grading systems with particular effort made to capture factors important to the treatment and outcomes of hip arthroscopy for labral injury. A video learning module describing the classifications was then developed from the video archive of surgeries performed by the senior author and reviewed by study participants. Following review of the module, a pilot study was completed using five randomly selected videos, after which participating surgeons met once more to discuss points of disagreement and to seek clarification. The final video collection for testing reliability was composed of 29 videos selected with the intent of capturing all sublevels of each classification scheme. Study participants recorded their assessments using each classification scheme, and interrater reliability was calculated by a study participant not involved in grading. The average kappa coefficients for the classification schemes ranged from 0.38 to 0.54, with the interrater reliability of all classification schemes except labral degeneration qualifying as moderate. The percent of cases with absolute agreement ranged from 17.2% to 51.7% across the classification systems. Even among a group of high-volume hip arthroscopists who engaged in several discussions about the proposed classification schemes, grades were found to have at best moderate interrater reliability. Moderate interrater reliability is demonstrated for novel grading systems for describing labral tear complexity, labral bruising, labral size, and extent of synovitis, and fair reliability is demonstrated for labral degeneration. Further development and refinement of multifactorial grading systems for describing labral injury are indicated. Evaluating the multifactorial nature of intra-articular lesions in the hip is an important part of intraoperative decision-making and defining reliable classifications for intra-articular lesions is a critical first step towards developing generalizable criteria for guiding treatment type. Level III.

Designing a Hybrid Biopharmaceutical Laboratory Course to Enhance Content Flexibility and Access

Herein we report the design of an upper-level hybrid laboratory course in the area of applied biopharmaceuticals, which has high scheduling flexibility, and utilizes both virtual and in-person educational elements to enhance students’ learning experience. This newly developed course applies chemical engineering knowledge, practical and theoretical, in the bioprocess and pharmaceutical industry, including crystallization, chromatography, and mass transport. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we transferred this lab course to a completely virtual mode during midsemester of Spring 2020. Despite the lack of in-person experiments during the second half of the semester, we introduced various additional elements including modeling, simulation, literature review, and added lectures to the virtual version of the course to improve students’ learning experience. These additional elements introduced during the virtual period enriched the course content and exposed students to more advanced applications of the knowledge in this course, which can be implemented in future hybrid modes. Although the student performance on quizzes and lab reports remained consistent after the transition to online format, the instructors noticed students struggling with data mined from previous groups. The root cause of this was not being able to create and observe their own data in real time, which could be improved by developing better remote data collection methods. Another lesson we learned during this experience is the value of keeping an experimental video archive for all of our laboratory modules, regardless of plans for remote learning.

Conservation and curation

This article identifies and examines the research methods involved in curating a national collection of British music videos for the British Film Institute and British Library in relation to existing scholarship about the role of the curator, the function of canons in the humanities, and the concept of a hierarchy of screen arts. It outlines the process by which a theoretical definition of “landmarks” guided the selection of works alongside a commitment to include a regionally and socially diverse selection of videos to reflect the variations in film style of different music genres. The article also assesses the existing condition of British music video archives: rushes, masters, as well as documents and digital files, and the issues presenting academics and students wishing to study them. It identifies the fact that music video exists in the gaps between two disciplines and industries (popular music studies / the music industry and film and television studies / the screen industries) as an additional challenge to curators of the cultural form, alongside complex matters of licensing and formats.