Editorial

This special issue of VIEW was inspired by a call from the final conference of the project “European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage” (CADEAH). The project brought together interdisciplinary expertise in the curation of digital audiovisual heritage (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), contemporary European history (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Republic) and Digital Humanities (Umeå University, Sweden) to study the ‘afterlife’ of digitized audiovisual heritage once it was made accessible and shared online, something that has seen a great deal of growth throughout the first two decades of this century.

Making audiovisual heritage accessible to the public is an increasingly important goal for a range of institutions. Earlier European projects lead by Utrecht University and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision such as Video Active¹, EUscreen (2009-2012) and EUscreenXL (2013-2016)² created infrastructures to digitize audiovisual archival material from the collections of film- and television archives all over Europe and make it available on EUscreen.eu and Europeana.eu. Other public and commercial archives such as the French Insitut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) or British Pathé created their own online portals to market their extensive archival holdings. And obviously, the emergence of YouTube as an archive³ and thousands of other online video sharing platforms have created spaces where archival institutions, broadcasters, amateur collectors and average users share audiovisual heritage.

But what happens to digitized audiovisual heritage once it is shared online? How does audiovisual heritage circulate online? To what extent do users re-use or re-mix audiovisual heritage? And, more specifically from an archival perspective: How do strategies of curation shape the appropriation of digitized heritage? What new perspectives on European history and identity do digital curations and appropriations of audiovisual heritage create? How can audiovisual archives better foster the re-use of Europe’s audiovisual heritage?

Those were our questions at the start of the CADEAH project in 2018, logical follow-ups from the earlier EUscreen-projects mentioned. In these projects much effort had been taken to create secure platforms to guarantee that users could not download and illegally re-use copyrighted heritage material from the participating archives - one of their larger concerns. However, nothing was really known about the ‘afterlife’ of the audiovisual heritage that was now accessible online. The potential for (legal and illegal) re-use was there, but there was little insight about whether this potential actually translated to anything. Would users be at all interested enough in archival heritage to re-use it? And if so, how could that material be tracked and traced so that archives might know what this re-use is, and maybe even benefit from it?⁴

While commercial platforms such as YouTube have developed fingerprinting technologies to detect reuse and potential copyright violations of materials shared online, INA seems to be the only public archive that has invested in developing a tool, named SiGNATURE⁵, to identify reuse of its own archival holdings (some of which is discussed in this issue). Other public archives have not and probably will not invest in these technologies, since building such an infrastructure is expensive and not a core task of public archives. However, as the case of British Pathé shows, opening up archival collections for re-use can be a promising business model. While British Pathé has its own archival website for professional users (that buy archival material for their productions), it has also released its holdings in low resolution on YouTube for public circulation. Any re-use of British Pathé’s copyrighted material on YouTube is not seen as a copyright violation but is simply welcome: if it is watched by a user in the original or as part of a re-mix video, the fingerprint identifies it as British Pathé’s material and British Pathé, as a member of YouTube’s content partner programme, gets its share.⁶

Monetized or not, the circulation of archival material raises more fundamental questions about the nature and the politics of archives, tracing and tracking archival material online, popular practices of re-use and, maybe most importantly, the old and new stories told with that material. The CADEAH project tackled these questions to some extent, as the short contributions by project members in this special issue discuss: Maria Eriksson on digitized cultural heritage archives and commercial content identification tools, Adéla Gjuričová on digital utopia and the loss of historical consciousness and Abby S. Waysdorf on personalized uses of audiovisual heritage online.

In this special issue we wanted to broaden our view and discuss our insights with scholars from diverse disciplines and with diverse professional backgrounds. These articles showcase the methodological and conceptual approaches that are being used across Europe to understand, and encourage, the use of audiovisual heritage, investigating contemporary practices of re-use and the ways that archives themselves think about these challenges.

In the Explorations section, we see the work of the Crossing Borders Archives (CROBORA) project, founded by the French National Research Agency and led by the Sic.Lab at Université Côte d’Azur in partnership with the French Insitut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), RAI (RadioTelevisione Italiana), Mediaset, Luxembourg University, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the Universities of Lille, Paris Nanterre, and Paris Sorbonne. Researchers Shiming Shen, Mattteo Treleani, Dario Compagno, and Marco Winckler discuss how their aim of tracking stock shots across European archives requires both a computer-aided and an intense manual process of analysis. They conceptualize stock shots as a form of “ghost data,” appearing as part of different documents in a database, fragments from a larger piece that is still unknown, which makes them particularly hard to catalogue and thus understand how these images circulate. Their article in this issue describes their process for identifying such “ghosts” and explores what this means for understanding their use.

Johan Malmstedt’s article explores a spectral frequency analysis of the first two decades of Swedish television news. This methodology scientifically analyses the sound of these broadcasts, focusing on their frequencies and thus their sonic palettes, the hows of the sound. Sound itself is an as-yet underresearched aspect of television studies, and this article explores how it can be used to understand the changes that Swedish television went through as it developed, investigating how frequencies increase and widen as the ideas around presence and authenticity of the news change. This brings us new insights into not only Swedish television news, but what sound analysis can bring to the study of television history.

In the Discovery section, we can see the work of archiving and archival use in new lights. Anne-Katrin Weber and François Vallotton interview Simone Comte, project owner at Radio Télévision Suisse, discussing the history of RTS’ digitisation practices before turning to the contemporary challenges of archiving, from access to algorithms to AI. As the very existence of the CADEAH project suggests, audiovisual archives themselves are at a crucial reflection point, and this collaboratory discussion between two media historians and an archivist shows ways this is being worked through in practice.

Use of audiovisual archives is at the forefront of the article by Shane O’Sullivan, Ciara Chambers, and Colm McAuliffe, which traces the evolution of the Make Film History project. This project aims to open up access to cultural heritage for students and emerging filmmakers, which comes with a considerable set of challenges. This article discusses how these challenges were overcome to build a sustainable model for creative reuse, developing the work of emerging filmmakers, building new connections between educators and archivists, and creating guides to how archival material can be creatively reused within the current systems of licensing and copyright clearing. The work of these emerging filmmakers is also showcased here, displaying the potential of creative reuse of archival material.

Finally, we have a reflection on the archival collecting, and eventual reuse, of born-digital material, particularly that of the website hosting platform GeoCities, which was active throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Marijn Josephien Bril discusses the different ways in which GeoCities material was archived (and eventually re-displayed) after its shutdown by Yahoo. Bril identifies several sources archiving this material of the “early Web,” then turns to focus on artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. This project takes a “performative archival” approach that both re-uses and safeguards this material, performing it together with old and new users. As the “early Internet” starts to fade both from memory and the places it was made and stored, this work becomes crucial to think about how we as scholars and archivists can preserve this past.

Through this issue, we invite readers to reflect on this period of curation and appropriation of digital audiovisual heritage, and to think about what is happening as archival material is digitised and made accessible. What are its potentials? What are its problems? What can - and can’t - we do under current regimes of copyright and control? Where do we go from here?

We hope that you find these glimpses into these questions inspiring.

Abby S. Waysdorf and Eggo Müller