Journalism History And Digital Archives

This book showcases various ways in which digital archives allow for new approaches to journalism history. The chapters in this book were selected based on three overall objectives: 1) research that highlights specific concerns within journalism history through digital archives; 2) discussions of digital methodologies, as well as specific applications, that are accessible for journalism scholars with no prior experiences with such approaches; and 3) that journalism history and digital archives are connected in other ways than through specific methods, i.e., that the connection raises larger questions of historiography and power. The contributions address cases and developments in Asia, South and North America and Europe; and range from long-range, big-data, machine-leaning and topic modelling studies of journalistic characteristics and meta-journalistic discourses to critiques of archival practices and access in relation to gender, social movements and poverty. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

By the time readers encounter academic history in the form of books and articles, all that tends to be left of an author’s direct experience with archives is pages of endnotes. Whether intentionally or not, archives have until recently been largely thought of as discrete collections of documents, perhaps not neutral but rarely considered to be historical actors. This book brings together top media scholars to rethink the role of the archive and historical record from the perspective of writing media history. Exploring the concept of the archive forces a reconsideration of what counts as historical evidence. In this analysis the archive becomes a concept that allows the authors to think about the acts of classifying, collecting, storing, and interpreting the sources used in historical research. The essays included in this volume, from Susan Douglas, Lisa Gitelman, John Nerone, Jeremy Packer, Paddy Scannell, Lynn Spigel, and Jonathan Sterne, focus on both the theoretical and practical ways in which the archive has affected how media is thought about as an object for historical analysis. This book was published as a special issue of The Communication Review.

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge).

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all—part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

This book examines the use and re-use of digital archives in a unique manner, by combining theoretical and practical approaches to the contemporary digital archive. The book brings together a range of writers - specialising in media and cultural studies, contemporary art and art history, digital and networked culture, library and museum studies - to explore the cultural impact of digital archives. Several of the essays describe the process of constructing a digital archive as a specific case study – in digitising a physical archive and designing a searchable digital database as the core of the digital archive. Other chapters explore the cultural significance of digital archives in more general theoretical terms. These considerations include: the specific properties of the digital archive; its similarities and differences to the traditional paper-based archive; the ethical decisions made in the design of an archive; and the potential for creative re-use of online archived materials.

In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians' diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security. In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.

New forms of digitalization and digital media technologies are positively and negatively disrupting the free flow of information preservation. These new technologies are revolutionizing the way messages are transmitted and breaking the traditional monopolization of information by well-established institutions. Exploring the Relationship Between Media, Libraries, and Archives provides emerging research on new digital trends in information preservation, origination, and sharing. While highlighting the current shift in information sharing from institutional archives to digital platforms, readers will learn how media, librarians, and archivists reinvent their processes to meet the ever-progressing needs of users. This book is an ideal resource for librarians, archivists, information preservers, and media professionals aiming to find a balance among the use of media, new digital technologies, libraries, and archives in preserving and furthering information sharing.

Television History, the Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory is the first edited volume devoted to the Peabody Awards Collection, a unique repository of radio and TV programs submitted yearly since 1941 for consideration for the prestigious Peabody Awards. The essays in this volume explore the influence of the Peabody Awards Collection as an archive of the vital medium of TV, turning their attention to the wealth of programs considered for Peabody Awards that were not honored and thus have largely been forgotten and yet have the potential to reshape our understanding of American television history. Because the collection contains programming produced by stations across the nation, it is a distinctive repository of cultural memory; many of the programs found in it are not represented in the canon that dominates our understanding of American broadcast history. The contributions to this volume ask a range of important questions. What do we find if we look to the archive for what's been forgotten? How does our understanding of gender, class, or racial representations shift? What different strategies did producers use to connect with audiences and construct communities that may be lost? This volume's contributors examine intersections of citizenship and subjectivity in public-service programs, compare local and national coverage of particular individuals and social issues, and draw our attention to types of programming that have disappeared. Together they show how locally produced programs--from both commercial and public stations--have acted on behalf of their communities, challenging representations of culture, politics, and people.