Videographic Scholarship from Below: A Practice-Based Media Archaeology of (and through) Digital Tools

This article proposes a dialogue between videographic scholarship and media archaeology to develop a practiceoriented reflexivity within the digital humanities (DH). Whereas empirically oriented big-data approaches in DH increasingly acknowledge the biases of computational tools, they still tend not to test these insights through singular and experimental practices. Videographic scholarship offers an alternative: a hands-on tinkering with moving images and sounds that thrives on play, subjectivity, and defamiliarisation in the use of software and online environments. Yet such reflexivity remains incomplete if digital tools function only as instruments and not as objects of inquiry as well.

To push this impulse further, the article introduces videographic scholarship from below, an approach that combines the reflexive investigation of audiovisual culture with a microhistorical attention to digital tools and interfaces themselves. In tandem with experimental media archaeology, the article outlines three principles of videographic scholarship from below: (1) (re)enactment of objects, (2) media anachronism, and (3) DIY constructivism. In turn, videographic methods can explore how digital tools and interfaces have historically been shaped, what affordances and constraints they entail, and how they might be redesigned for the future.