The culch is the bed on which oysters grow. Composed of discarded shells, stones and grit – thrown overboard once the dredge has been sifted for marketable oysters – the culch is the fertile ground on which future harvests rely.

Bin cuts are the bed on which this film has grown. Composed of discarded shots, retakes and tails – thrown on the cutting room floor once the edit has been sifted for marketable material – bin cuts are the fertile ground on which archival documentaries can flourish.

Following a technique deployed by Adam Curtis (Hypernormalisation, Bitter Lake), From the Culch finds authenticity, honesty and emotional truth in the unwanted, unplanned and unguarded moments left behind by history.

Harvested from Bin Cuts proposes that these once discarded moments of aesthetically and narratively undesirable footage are, in fact, a more fitting container for emotion and memory than the carefully staged and framed footage more common to broadcast documentaries.

This paper will detail a production process that in itself was cathartic and deeply moving and consider how film is impacted by a desire to remain true to the memory of people, language and place.

The filmmakers – in their editing decisions, in sound design and score, in interview technique and writing – sought to honour the material, retaining the sense of discovery that comes from opening a can of film whose contents are deemed valueless to some yet are priceless to others.

This essentially humanist intent finds a kinship in the films of Tim Plester and Rob Curry (The Way of Morris, upcoming documentary The Island of Doc Rowe), whose archival films will be considered as a model for this approach.

Founded in August 1968, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive holds over 40,000 hours of news broadcasts from national television networks across the United States of America and continues to be one of the most extensive and complete archives of television news in the world. Containing over fifty years’ worth of broadcasts, the archive has grown into a vital resource for television news media researchers and anyone else who might be interested in seeing the first draft of the last fifty years of American history.

The story of the archive’s founding is narrative as equally compelling and – perhaps – surprising as some of the stories contained within its servers. The archive’s founder, initial financial backer and chief fundraiser, Paul Simpson, was a deeply conservative businessman and was convinced that network news broadcasts were contributing to social turmoil and unrest across America. He created the archive not necessarily with the needs of future media and journalism researchers in mind but with the express purpose of demonstrating that the networks were, as he alleged, deeply biased against the conservative right in America.

This paper considers how we might “read” the archive’s collection in the context of its founding and whether the intent behind its creation has – or should have – any bearing on the way that researchers interact with the archive and its contents today. Furthermore, it looks at similarities between the rhetoric surrounding the creation of the archive and similar sentiments concerning television journalism expressed by politicians and other social actors today and discusses the potential impacts of this rhetoric on the use of the archive now and in the future.

It is now widely acknowledged among scholars that television as a medium played a pivotal role in the unfolding of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 (Petrovszky, Tichindeleanu, Romanian Revolution Televised, 2018). This assertion is commonly understood to highlight the significance of the Romanian Revolution as a historical event that was broadcast in real-time, thus marking the inauguration of a new era in the history of media. It also implies the gradual change of status of Romanian Television as an institution during those intense days, from a catalyst of popular discontent to becoming the main agent of large-scale manipulation.

However, this paper posits that such arguments predominantly rely on an imperfect and incomplete engagement with, as well as a truncated analysis of, the available archival corpus of televisual footage amassed during the days of the revolution. It argues that a vast majority of theoretical and practical contributions to this topic, spanning from Jean Baudrillard’s essay on the mass graves of Timisoara and the more general proliferation of simulacra to the seminal found footage film Videograms of a Revolution (1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, have culminated in the creation of what film critic Serge Daney referred to as “trademark images” (images de marque) – convenient clichés which block the acquisition of critical knowledge.

By methodically tracing a recent personal involvement with the existing archival material through a selection of illuminating case studies that contradict or prolong previous interpretations, this article advocates for an extension of the mass of images deserving consideration when addressing the subject of the Romanian Revolution. Furthermore, it aims to show that a comprehensive examination of this body of footage could generate updated perspectives on this particular matter, allowing for contradictory and enriching evaluations that could effectively challenge ossified interpretations which have pervaded both academic and popular discourse for decades.

On 21 August 1993, the media circus came to the besieged east of Mostar. After
more than three months of virtual isolation, the first UN delegation arrived without food but with a slew of journalists and at least five professional TV news cameras. Five days later, a second convoy arrived with food, medicine and even more cameras. Subsequently, the population organised a sit-down protest, preventing the convoy from leaving the enclave until a permanent UN presence was secured.

Bernard Stiegler observed that media tend to “produce” the news, and indeed the cameras in Mostar filmed the suffering population and the humanitarian efforts of various NGOs, but they also filmed each other and their various reporters and entourage. However, the resulting news reporting focused on the “humanitarian story”, and any elements that reveal the conditions of production, or the agency of the besieged population, were mostly edited out.

Broadcast and news archives tend to preserve only edited, “finished” features, and rushes often get lost from the audiovisual record. However, I located raw rushes from two sources (UNTV and CNN) that were present in Mostar during those days, and I analysed them for elements that expose the modus operandi, as well as the biases and the blind spots in the news reporting from that time and place.

The production of photographic images is an exercise of power over those who are photographed, and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay urges a program of reclaiming historic images for those who are photographed, who, in her view, should be the rightful owners. However, as both Richard Misek and Dai Vaughan have remarked, images also contain the capacity to tell unintended stories.

Sherry Katz emphasises the need for feminist historians to ‘research around our subjects’, finding fragments and traces in different places to construct as full a picture as possible of the women we are studying. I have found this the best approach in my research on women working in costume and make-up in television production in the UK from the 1950s to the present day, which will be illustrated in this paper.  

 Archives are not neutral repositories of historical documents; rather, they reflect the culture of the organisations that preserve them, and archival absences tell us much about the curating institution. On a recent visit to the BBC’s Written Archives, none of the women I was researching had archived personal files, despite some being Heads of Departments. However, I was able to find fascinating documents which illustrated how they, and their work, were viewed, and of course, that work is visible in the archived productions they worked on.

 To build the picture of women’s production careers, we need to look beyond institutional repositories and create new archival sources. With living subjects, oral histories are a mainstay, and organisations like the BECTU History Project undertake commendable work in sharing such recordings. I’ve recorded many video, audio and online oral history interviews. Through each, I’ve learnt more about the often-underappreciated creative work that women in costume and make-up performed. 

 Personal collections must also be searched out. With the women I’ve studied, several have kept detailed scrapbooks, albums, and folders which document their careers. An important task is the future preservation of these collections, finding them a safe home when their original curators can no longer store them. One digital possibility is an online community archive, like the one that I run: http://pebblemill.org, a collection which documents and celebrates the history of BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham. 

Katz, S. J. (2010) ‘Excavating Radical Women in Progressive-Era California’, in Nupur Chauduri, Sherry J. Katz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (eds), Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 

In this presentation, I will make some methodological considerations stemming from the research project Broadcasting UK Feminist Video: Mapping Local Histories and Transnational Networks of the 1980s in the BFI Archive, which employs digital tools to reconstruct the collaborations of feminist and women filmmakers and producers with UK broadcasters (Channel 4; ITV) in the context of the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985). The investigation, funded by the FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Grant, analyses a selection of 23 programmes – mostly current events shows and documentaries, from the BFI National Television Archive to produce data visualisations, such as maps and network analysis. These visual aids combine data from the analysis of the programmes with information on their production and circulation to recuperate spatial and relational patterns of representation and collaboration. 

The liminal status of these productions, which circulated beyond television, particularly in educational and activist circuits, challenges the possibility to trace back and harmonise the data about broadcasting with those concerning other modes of – alternative and non-theatrical – consumption. Moreover, the digital methodologies employed by the project often struggled to convey the historical complexity retrieved from ‘analogue’ materials in non-audiovisual archives. Drawing from this empirical challenge, this paper will reflect on the continuities and conflicts arising from the combined use of digital and analogue infrastructures in archival research. These reflections will also focus on the epistemological and political contradictions that digital methods impose on a feminist research project, whose starting point is the questioning of hegemonic modes of historical reconstruction based on the objectivity and transparency of archives. By putting into dialogue feminist scholarship in the fields of data science, digital humanities and media history, the paper will ultimately call for a broader integration of reflexive practices in archival research.

This paper will explore the Play for Today ‘canon’ and how a process of reckoning with it has begun via institutions like the BFI and the BBC, though remains incomplete. The BBC1 single-play strand had its 50th birthday in 2020, and since this time, work by writers of colour, women writers, and queer writers, as well as work belonging to maligned aesthetic modes and undervalued themes, has re-emerged as significant and worthy of critical attention. Despite these positive changes, the Play for Today archive is still to be fully opened out and expanded.

Central to this opening out and expanding is the acknowledgement that access to archives, in many cases, remains a classed issue: this paper calls for a re-energised conversation about the remit of public service broadcasters and the gatekeeping of publicly produced mass art from past eras as artefacts for select scholarly interest or as points of interest for those belonging to strict categories pertaining to identity. I will argue that only ‘decanonising’ will serve the marginalised creators and themes that re-canonisation can only tokenise, while serving the large and varied audiences such works were intended for. As such, this paper calls for a radical reimagining of the broadcast archive’s uses and its potential to dismantle the stranglehold of the canon.

While studying the myth of the ‘empowered’ Malayali woman who becomes the exemplar of literacy and socio-cultural values in the state of Kerala in India, one becomes acutely aware of the noetic and affective ‘culturing’ of the Malayali woman and her sensibilities. As a researcher working on Malayalam soap operas, it is pertinent to access various archival resources that would shed light on what constitutes ‘women’s genres’ in the region and the ideology of taste and refinement that undergird the easy association of certain genres with women. Given this, the proposed paper attempts to define the politics of intellectualism that determines what is archivable and what is not. This will provide vital insights into the link between ideations pertaining to the ‘ideal’ Malayali woman, the pedagogical functions attributed to ‘women’s genres’ and the politics of archiving. The paper argues that certain class-ed and gendered impulses mediate the process of archiving, as is evident from the absence of certain women’s magazines like Manorama and Mangalam from the public archives in the state. This will be instrumental in identifying what qualifies as knowledge worth revisiting. To this end, the paper will use as primary materials not only the interviews with librarians on the driving motives behind archiving but also the entries published in various Malayalam magazines, periodicals and newspapers to tease out the cultural value attributed to ‘women’s genres’ in Keralam and how it influences the archival worth of these genres. 

Many recent studies have been done on the impact that working in journalism has on journalist’s mental health. This includes heightened rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. According to a salary and demographics survey conducted by the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), archivists also experience higher rates of mental health struggles than the general public. 

Unfortunately, little to no data currently exists that examines archivist mental health in relation to the type of archive they work for. There is, however, certainly a correlation to be made between journalists and archivists who work in broadcast media archives. Much of this is due to the traumatic nature of the material within the broadcast media collection. Material in these archives often includes, but is not limited to, local tragedies, problematic histories, global conflict, and human rights violations.

So, what happens to the mental health of the archivist when needing to constantly inspect, catalog, and make accessible this horrific material? Using concepts such as lived experience, archival bias, the person-centered archive, and trauma-informed archival practise, this presentation examines the current archival media landscape as it relates to archivist mental health for those who work in broadcast media archives.

The panel concludes by offering strategies on how to best support archivists working with this problematic and important material. Proper support networks and open conversation are a necessity if we are to care for archivists who work with broadcast media collections.

Heroic images of coal miners crouching in darkness or holding the picket line are amply represented in the visual repertoire of documentary filmmaking. In the UK, the National Coal Board produced the Mining Review newsreel for over three decades, distributing it to cinemas in colliery towns across the land. The end of the newsreel, the year before the miners’ strike, was symptomatic of the broader shift afoot. But on the margins of this story, there was another coal industry, that of opencast mining – a newly globalised industry. In this paper, I will discuss two projects that involved researching and screening sponsored television content about opencast coal mining in Scotland and Colombia, where the largest mine in South America started operating in 1985. The projects used audiovisual archives to engage with local memories of landscape and with current discussions of energy transitions and land restoration. The comparative strategy highlighted the different ways in which mining can intersect with communities’ relationships to territory and how questions of socioenvironmental impact are negotiated in formal and narrative terms.

This paper will examine TV reviews from the girls’ magazine Just Seventeen between 1985 and 1987 drawn from the Femorabilia archive of twentieth-century girls’ and women’s magazines, held at Liverpool John Moores University. Popular girls’ magazines established a wide readership during the 1970s and commanded considerable influence in how their readers engaged with other forms of media, leisure and entertainment. In the 1980s, TV reviews and previews became a regular feature, and teenagers were being more widely acknowledged as also being television viewers with an increasing agency with regard to family viewing choices, to examine what was offered to its readership as ‘not to be missed’.

Historically girls’ comics and magazines have been undervalued both financially and culturally (Gibson, 2015), meaning that although they were hugely popular and widely consumed, their preservation has been precarious. Little attention has been paid to existing research on these magazines’ representation of screen media and their framing of how their audience might engage with popular film and television. Just Seventeen’s TV section offers an alternative to traditional broadcast archives, which can yield insights into how the sought-after young audience has historically been addressed and how girls’ own responses to viewing appear in reader-focused spaces of the magazine, such as letter pages. This range of views and voices enables an exploration of how viewing is framed in relation to the social dynamics of the family and the changing sense of authority and autonomy in this process that can be discerned during the mid-1980s. The paper addresses questions about the benefits of such archival research on TV viewing discussions for young viewers and the ability of such magazines to embody a different kind of ‘broadcast archive’.

Archives are often a site of contention, acting themselves as an archive of the archival process. In ‘Archivipelago’ I propose a decolonial and relational engagement with archival material, and thus, in combination with making creative work with this material, an alternative approach to archival processes is explored. The ‘inherent violence’ and ‘forcing an acceptance on those subjugated of the inferiority of their culture’ (Higgins) is always present in colonial practices. In an Irish context, one such example is the violence done to the Irish language. An alternative archive of Ireland exists and is accessible through its language. However, given colonial destruction and postcolonial policies, the language is not spoken fluently by a majority of the people on the island. Therefore, oblique archival access is available through the archives of Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Ireland’s public broadcaster. Founded in 1926, the  RTÉ archives therefore are postcolonial archives in themselves. Within that, again, every piece contained in the archive is in itself an archive. In ‘Archivipelago’ I propose to create an audiovisual piece exploring the connections within and between these multiple archives. 

While the language, landscape and people were violated in innumerable ways during the colonial centuries, one such example is through cartography and place-naming. Efficient in their administrative control, British imperial powers gave English names to all the places in  Ireland. However, this was not done through translation but through a phonetical mangling of  Irish language sounds into the English language. This deliberate act severed the connection between name and place contained in the Irish language, resulting in English language names that are void of meaning in any language. 

Inspired by ‘archipelagic thinking’, ‘Archivipelago’ will employ the relational metaphor of an island archipelago and ‘sea of islands’ (Hau’ofa) to examine our interconnected worlds and imagined alternative relations. In rejecting the colonial designation of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, Édouard Glissant and Kamau Braithwaite highlight a global relationality of ‘dialogue’ and ‘flow’.  In affirming the interconnectedness of islands in an archipelago, they argue against the drawing of boundaries central to colonialism. In my proposal, I consider broadcasting an archipelagic practice, encouraging and embracing the connection between islands of viewers 

and listeners. Archives, as an often centralised container, deny the tentacular, archipelagic nature of the materials gathered within. In ‘Archivipelago’, I wish to release these islands while insisting on their interconnectedness. Through a VJ (video DJ) mixing approach, I wish to reflect the flow connecting islands, real and imagined, to one another. Specifically, I will mix  Irish language material from the RTÉ archives into a creative rendering of archipelagic archival practice.  

In emphasising the connections across space and across time, my proposal embraces  ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg), which highlights the ‘dynamic transfers that [occur]  between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance,’ and therefore, the ways in which acts of remembrance are interwoven and implicated in each other. A fundamentally relational approach, relationality challenges binaries in Western thinking, providing  “alter/native” historiography to linear models of progress”. (De Loughrey) There are three flows of relationality at play in this proposal: relationality through imagination, relationality across time, and relationality across space – through archive, broadcast and language.  

Broadcast practice and its archive have the potential to powerfully connect people across space and time. In addressing themes of speculative pasts, decolonisation, transcultural resonance,  and multidirectional memory, ‘Archivipelago’ invites attendees into a multidisciplinary co-listening experience across imagined space-time. I claim that such an approach will better enable us to reimagine the potential of our current ‘islands’ and their relationship to other  ‘islands’ in a network of multidirectional audiovisual relations. My piece will ask the question:  can an archipelagic approach to broadcast archive, through deconstruction and reconstruction, result in a creative act of decolonisation?

Establishing a first pilot inventory of privately-owned local TV channels operating in Italy between 1976 and 1990 is the core aim of the ATLas – Atlas of Local Televisions project, nationally-funded research currently encompassing four Italian universities, with the intent of driving attention on an often neglected area of both academic investigation and archival practice. The research focuses on a sample of five networks which operated in contrast to the national public service monopoly, with vibrant creative innovations and a distinct connection with territories and local economies. After an overview of the inquiry’s scientific layout, this contribution will delve into the methodological challenges implied in the design of an open-access repository called to host a selection of audiovisual fragments drawn from the channels’ native archives, now difficult or impossible to access, or archived following random or commercial criteria. The video platform is also conceived as the entry point of a dedicated digital exhibition with additional materials (photographs, documents and unpublished interviews). With an account of the analysis currently being conducted on three case studies (Antenna 3, Sardegna 1 and TeleSanterno), this contribution seeks to tackle the following questions: i., how should the renegotiation of collective memories and nostalgic self-perceptions of the past be dealt with, and problematized? ii. which archival infrastructure(s) best suit the need of addressing both industry-oriented issues and oral, social and local histories? iii. by what means is this process complying with standards of cultural heritage valorisation, and how could this pave the path for a prospective permanent atlas of Italian local broadcasting? The aim is to share and discuss some lessons learnt, as well as the main struggles encountered through the study, in a fruitful exchange with similar and more advanced experiences.

This paper will examine a case study of how one programme produced over thirty years ago, forgotten in the archive of a local television company, has the potential to contribute research that critically reflects on artistic commemorations of the victims of terrorism. The paper will argue that it is vital that broadcast archives actively explore links with the academic community to open their catalogues to re-discover programmes that can contribute to contemporary research on a range of cultural themes.

Songs for the Falling Angel – Requiem for Lockerbie (1991) is a 60 mins documentary produced for ITV. The programme documents the collaboration of visual artist Keith McIntyre RSA, composer Karen Wimhurst, and poet Douglas Lipton. With a commission from the Edinburgh International Festival, they developed a multi-disciplinary artistic performance responding to the horrifying events of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie that had taken place three years earlier on 21 December 1988, causing the deaths of 270 people. This commission was inspired by McIntyre’s vivid drawings and paintings of the motif of an Angel’s winged head; this led to a sequence of poems from Lipton drawing on a 7th-century myth of a fiery cross falling through the sky; working in McIntyre’s studio, Wimhurst sketched out a new polyphonic choral composition, involving two female soloists and a sixteen-voice choir accompanied by saxophone and harp. The first performance took place in Edinburgh in August 1991 and was described by The Washington Post as a “complex, symbolic work…created by an artist, a writer, and a composer as a response to the unspeakable terror of Scotland’s worst peacetime disaster”. The performance was recorded by an STV crew directed by Alistair Scott. He went on to create a one-hour programme intercutting the performance with news footage from Lockerbie and documentary sequences with the collaborators. The completed programme sought to combine music, a poetic libretto and visual imagery to bring a sense of catharsis and healing was shown on ITV on Sunday, 22 December 1991. 

Tracking down the programme from Scottish Television’s private archive – the presenter’s research has brought together the original collaborators to (re)view the programme and reflect on the importance of finding creative expression to respond to the horror of the Pan Am 103 bombing. They consider the legacy of the project and, in the context of other artistic responses to acts of terrorism, investigate questions about ways artists can collaborate to respond to acts of atrocity. It’s just one example of how there is a need to facilitate greater engagement with broadcast archives for research purposes.

This paper sketches out the initial research findings of a British Academy-funded project that explores the evolution of language used to report on postwar Black and Black-British migration and experience in news produced for the BBC Home Service and its successor, Radio Four. 

The project also invites different generations of the public from African and Caribbean backgrounds to speak back to the BBC’s reporting and to reflect on the BBC’s impact on ideas of identity and belonging. 

Research for this project has been facilitated by access to the recently digitised collection of 165,000 radio news scripts for the BBC Home Service/Radio Four. The talk will discuss methodological questions relating to the use of such a vast digital archive and its potential for public engagement and access. 

This paper examines the way in which two archives in two different countries, the BBC’s broadcast archive at Caversham and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre, instituted in 1963 and named for its founder and housing many of Boston University Libraries’ distinctive collections, were exploited for the purposes of exploring the work of a well-known journalist, Alistair Cooke who presented the world’s longest-running speech radio programme. This paper looks at how we interrogated these two archives to establish a definitive list of Cooke’s body of radio broadcast work and also how the correspondence and documents kept there relate to how Cooke’s journalism was produced.

The paper explores the relationship between the two archives, in both of which the authors have spent significant time. For example, the BBC partnered with Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center to create a unique linked archive – so it is possible to see how Cooke crafted his scripts while at the same time listening to the programmes (Watson 2014).

Through interviews with the BBC, a Cooke family member, and Cooke’s literary agent, we also investigate the history of the relationship between the journalist and the archives and how both the BBC and Boston University secured Cooke’s professional and personal documents. In the case of Cooke’s relationship with Boston University, this followed a long period of courtship by Howard Gotlieb, who had met Cooke at Yale many years before (Clarke 1999:513). Meanwhile, the BBC houses a significant number of original broadcasts and scripts and correspondence between Cooke and BBC executives.