Film and Media Studies – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

MITH Receives NEH Grant for “Unlocking the Airwaves”

Stephanie Sapienza — Thu, 10 May 2018 15:17:56 +0000

MITH is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities 2017 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program for Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection. Unlocking the Airwaves, directed by Stephanie Sapienza with Co-PI Eric Hoyt, is a multi-institutional collaboration between MITH, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Historical Society, University Libraries at the University of Maryland, with collaborative support from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at WGBH/Library of Congress, and the Radio Preservation Task Force.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The Endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.These grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-review process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities quality and public engagement.

The $217,000 grant will fund the creation of a comprehensive online collection of early educational public radio content from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). The forerunner of CPB and its arms, NPR and PBS, the NAEB served as the primary organizer, developer, and distributor for noncommercial broadcast production and analysis between 1925 and 1981. These broadcasts, mostly stemming from university and public school-run radio stations, provide an in-depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century. According to the project’s Lead Advisor, Josh Shepperd of Catholic University and Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force,

“The National Association of Educational Broadcasters recordings provide valuable context into cultural, political, and less-studied, educational discourses going back to the New Deal, and associated documents help media scholars to trace the origin of script development, audience research, and genres that we associate with both public media and cable television – science, travel, food, history, and journalism programming.”

The NAEB systematically preserved its history across over a hundred boxes of documents and 5,000 reels of tape, but the organization split its archive, depositing its papers in Wisconsin and the recordings in Maryland. Archival audiovisual media has been collected and maintained separately from other kinds of (primarily textual) archival sources, and these ‘split’ collections mean that researchers must often discover and manually reunite audiovisual collections and their related materials if they want to understand a broadcast not just as an audiovisual object, but as a medium that relays information within a set of historical contexts (time, place, related events, etc.). Unlocking the Airwaves will reunite the split NAEB collections, develop an open and comprehensive web portal for them, and tell the story of early educational and public broadcasting.

By coordinating the expertise of archivists, humanities researchers, and digital humanists, Unlocking the Airwaves will deliver enhanced access to important, mostly hidden, archival audiovisual materials by linking split hybrid paper/audiovisual collections together, and providing a search engine for the linked collections, enabling users to simultaneously search both the documents and sounds of the NAEB. The resulting resource will finally realize the potential of the collections of the NAEB for exploration and study by educators, scholars, journalists, documentarians, genealogists, and the broader public.

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Sarah Florini Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 16:00:23 +0000

Though publics are often conceived of as bounded by platform, users frequently deploy platforms in conjunction to create trans-platform digitally networked publics. The multi-media and trans-platform nature of such publics provide users with a range of affordances that allow them to oscillate the public between functioning as an enclave or as a counter-public. This talk discusses a network of Black American content creators and social media users to explore how such oscillation, between enclave and counter-public, occurs as participants move between platforms in the network and exploit, or work around, the affordances each offers.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Florini during her talk.

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Josh Shepperd Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 05:30:38 +0000

At a moment when public media is facing the threat of elimination from lawmakers, this presentation examines the organizational contributions made by noncommercial media research to U.S. informational history. Taking an institutional approach, this presentation looks at the infrastructural origins of public media in archival distribution practices after WWII.

In 1948 educational broadcasters were already 27 years into the first national media advocacy to create a system of universal access to public education. Due to inconsistent broadcast practices and lack of a profit model, advocates began to aggregate key quality programming from university stations at the University of Illinois under the moniker the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.

The result was the creation of a decentralized “Bicycle Network” built around archival management and distribution. The proto-metadata descriptions developed by the NAEB had the result of both coding and consolidating the characteristics of genres now associated with public broadcasting and cable television. In addition, quantitative audience research into the pedagogical effectiveness of each new genre led to the construction of the first academic Communication departments, beginning in 1948.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including links to resources and projects that Shepperd referenced during his talk.

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Gregory Zinman Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 13:30:04 +0000

This talk describes the discovery and significance of Etude (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik identified by the author in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recently-acquired Paik archive. Composed at Bell Labs, in collaboration with engineers, and written in an early version of FORTRAN, Etude stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—although it is not entirely clear whether Etude was, in fact, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or another artwork altogether. By exploring Etude’s uncertain status, as well as the piece’s more conceptual indeterminacies—between image and code, analog and digital, and film and music—this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of the nature of the archive, cinema’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Zinman during his talk.

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Elizabeth Losh Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 13:00:28 +0000

The study of computational media still has far to go when it comes to contradicting the solo white male inventor myths that are often reified in mainstream culture, although recent work in media archaeology that emphasizes the manual labor of participants with the apparatus is changing the narrative about the rise of software culture. It is perhaps useful to make comparisons to film studies, where scholarship about the role of labor, organizational communication, institutional rhetoric, domestic politics, systems of credit, and “below the line” production activities has long challenged the model of the lone auteur. Just as women were critical actors in the Hollywood saga in intensely collaborative roles such as casting and editing, pioneering work in computer graphics, virtual reality, interactive entertainment, and multimedia publishing reflected a collective production culture and its associated conflicts. Media studies could still do much more to recover social histories currently stored in informal archives, often in obsolete file formats, to support feminist scholarship, as part of the larger theoretical project of acknowledging the material, embodied, affective, situated, and labor-intensive character of technology. This talk focuses specifically on manual labor in the supply chain of digital media and how many hands don’t make light work.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue (now migrated to Sutori), including links to resources and projects that Losh referenced during her talk.

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Archiving America: The Vitaphone, the DVD, and Warner Bros. (re)Store Jazz History

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:00:03 +0000

In 2007 Warner Bros. released the 80th anniversary DVD edition of The Jazz Singer, a boxed set that includes 34 conversion-era sound shorts and a 90-minute documentary about the Vitaphone and the birth of sound cinema. This collection is a tempered version of Warner’s prior histories of the conversion that situate the studio squarely at the lead in what its executives unflinchingly labeled a “revolution” of the motion picture industry. While Warner Bros. explicitly appeals for a revision of its former hubris, the jazz shorts included in this volume not only support the studio’s prior nomination of Al Jolson as the leader of American jazz, they characterize American music history as a hodgepodge of white performances lacking a dominant trend and calling for a star. In this collection as in many of its other DVD releases, Warner Bros. recreates the film experience by including contemporary shorts that might plausibly (and in some cases would certainly) have been screened alongside the feature for which the disc was conceived. An attempt at historical accuracy, this practice instead constructs a spectator capable only of browsing the past for clues to what both he and the studio already know to be true. This presentation considers the practice of archiving American jazz for both the period of conversion and the present reconstruction of the era and argues that the potential for innovation enabled by digital remastering is complicated by Warner’s continued efforts to shape the reception of its historiography.

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Early Cinema as New Media

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:00:45 +0000

In this talk I will discuss early cinema as new media in the context of my recent book, Body Shots: Cinema’s Incarnations, 1893-1904 (University of California Press, 2007). Body Shots puts the human body at the center of cinema’s first decade of emergence, arguing for the complexity, richness, and sophistication of these moving corporeal representations as both formal objects and culturally resonant ones. Rather than treat the body as primarily marking identity—gendered, racial, national—or invoke it to make claims about early cinema’s sensational attractions in relation to modernity (two common approaches to the subject), I begin by focusing on films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about persons on public display, both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, as well as ordinary people self-consciously caught by the movie camera in their daily routines. The book closes with a meditation on early cinema and death (when the body stops moving), with implications for new media and technology studies more generally.

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