World Conference 2022

Recordings are now available!

World Conference 2022

As we draw close to the 47th FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Locarno, Switzerland, we look back at last year’s conference.

The FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2022 was held in Cape Town, South Africa. It was FIAT/IFTA’s first conference in the African continent and the organisation’s first in-person event since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To celebrate a World Conference to remember, we will be publishing recordings from a curated selection of the sessions from Cape Town. New videos will be available every Friday until the start of the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2023.

World Conference 2022

Visit the FIAT/IFTA website every Friday until the World Conference 2023 week to watch new sessions!

To join us in Locarno, Switzerland, for the 47th FIAT/IFTA World Conference, click below!

Access every recording from the World Conference 2022: Cape Town page.

A Study on the current issues on establishing the audiovisual archiving policies: The activities of The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP)

by Hyojin Choi

Information and Archival Science Research Institute Hankuk University of Foreign Languages

A Study on the current issues on establishing the audiovisual archiving policies: The activities of The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP)

The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP) is a professional and research group of people who are interested in the necessity of safeguarding audiovisual heritage and protection system in national level. This study covers the policy vacuum of audiovisual archiving in south Korea, the current issues of audiovisual archiving’s policy-making by national institutions, and civil activities, which have contributed to raise a new issue in their country. Even with the increasing popularity of so-called ‘Hallyu (Korean Wave)’ in movies, dramas, and pop music such as Squid Games and BTS, only several major terrestrial broadcasters have their own the exclusive copyright of re-use. National Archives of Korea(NAK) or Korean Film Archives(KOFA), main institutions of audiovisual archiving policy-making, don’t carry out any necessary action to protect national production like legal deposit, physical protection, providing access to the public, which are recommended in the UNESCO’s Recommendation adopted on 27 October 1980. The study focuses on the analysis of audiovisual archive under the negative environments on the safeguarding of audiovisual heritage in South Korea. The study also represents KAAP’s alternative actions to overcome this situation. KAAP has been re-established as corporate body since 2022. KAAP’s activities are more active to move national institutions, copyright holders, educators and researchers, etc. Since the beginning of 2022, KAAP launched the Social Memory Archiving Project, which means the building of an audiovisual archives for social memories captured in amateur films. KAAP will operate workshops and trainings with the publication of manual and guidelines. KAAP’s research on the policy and the governance on the audiovisual heritages to transmit it as a valuable cultural heritage. The study tries to find ideas to co-operate with national institutions and international organizations in order to implement basic and necessary policies.

Hyojin Choi, Senior Researcher

Majored Audiovisual Heritage Management for Master’s degree in INA-Sup (School in Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, French National Audiovisual Archives, 2011-2013).

Currently, present as a researcher at Institute of Information and Archival Science of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Seoul, South Korea). Working for national and institutional research project of Archival Science, Cultural Heritage, and Media. Obtained Ph.D in August 2021 from the Department of Information and Archival Science of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Established The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP) in September 2017 as a Director General. The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation research and organize related seminars and conferences (annual or semi-annual) on policy making of Audiovisual Heritage Protection and Safeguarding in South Korea.

Let’s play: Designing the preservation of interactive games

by Patrick McIntyre

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Let’s play: Designing the preservation of interactive games

Many audiovisual institutions around the world are grappling with the rapid growth of video games as a dominant entertainment and cultural form. The challenges are numerous and complex, from the technological to the industrial and cultural. They range from issues of digital storage to dependencies on proprietary systems to more philosophical questions around evolution of narrative form, social connection and aesthetics.

Globally, the games industry generated USD 178bn in 2021 – more than the music and movie industries combined – and with continued steep growth projected.

In Australia, games are played by over two thirds of the population, with 74% reporting that games help foster social connections, and 80% reporting that games have a positive impact on emotional wellbeing. Games are now the second most popular form of entertainment in Australian households behind streaming movie and tv services (and ahead of free to air services).

In 2019, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) began pro-actively collecting games alongside film, television, music, radio and other audiovisual forms. Working in collaboration with games developers, industry bodies and peer cultural institutions, it has pioneered new ways of understanding games as a cultural form, and how the history of games can be preserved. Beginning in 2022, the institution will begin collecting games produced in Australia assisted by government investment as part of funding contracts, cementing a shift away from games collecting as a ‘pilot’ exercise to ‘business as usual’.

NFSA is confident that an emerging network of institutions around the world will begin to collaboratively address these unique challenges of collecting and preserving games and interactive media according to the specific interests, specialisation and capacities of each.

This presentation will raise – if not always settle! – various issues in relation to the collecting of games and interactive media.

Patrick McIntyre, CEO

Patrick is an Australian cultural leader with over 30 years’ experience. Prior to joining the NFSA as CEO, he served as Executive Director of the Sydney Theatre Company for over 11 years. Earlier roles include Associate Executive Director of The Australian Ballet, General Manager of Sydney Film Festival and Marketing Manager of Sydney Opera House Trust and of Sydney Dance Company.

As a producer, he has worked on a variety of projects including the world premiere of Muriel’s Wedding the Musical; Sydney Theatre Company’s The Present on Broadway; and in 2007, The Nutcracker Live – a live via satellite broadcast of a performing arts event into cinemas, which was the first of its kind in Australia.

Patrick has also worked as a freelance music and entertainment writer and has presented at numerous conferences in Australia and internationally.

Through a glass darkly: How metadata can distort our view of the archive – and how we can correct it

by Tim Manders & Mari Wigham

Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Through a glass darkly: How metadata can distort our view of the archive – and how we can correct it

Metadata is the lens through which we view an archive. Without metadata, we are blind. As the amount – and quality – of metadata increases, our archive comes into focus. However, metadata is not a perfect lens.

Metadata is usually incomplete. Metadata is often heterogeneous – e.g. a TV programme requires different metadata than a newspaper article. Metadata is produced by different sources, each of which has its biases. For example, limited human capacity influences archival policy on selection and annotation, creating a bias towards the contemporary view of what – and who – is important. Or AI for detecting faces may incorrectly identify people of certain races if its training set was insufficiently diverse. Finally, how metadata is created changes over time. All these factors distort our view of the archive.

Traditionally, metadata serves to find items. Metadata distortion means we are more likely to find item A than item B, and miss item C completely. This distortion is not random, so it will structurally affect related items. For example, a particular group in society may be found less often, and therefore underrepresented in the final view of the archive.

Increasingly, metadata is used to answer questions about society, for example, in a data story investigating the media representation of politicians during elections. In this case, we risk misinterpreting patterns as meaningful trends, when in fact they come from the underlying metadata distortion. For example, do we find fewer women because the media underrepresents women, or because our AI misses them.

In this presentation, we explain our work to discover and document metadata distortions. We aim to raise awareness among archive users, so they understand what they do and don’t see. We will also discuss ways of both compensating for historical metadata distortions, and, where possible, avoiding distortions in the future.

Tim Manders, Advisor & Mari Wigham, Data Engineer

Tim Manders works at the Exploration department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He is experienced in operationalising automatic annotation techniques such as speaker labeling, thesaurus label extraction and face recognition, applied on daily ingest into the archive with the purpose of pinpointing fine grained access points into our collection items.

Mari Wigham is a data engineer at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, working on innovative ways of helping researchers to work with the archive. She studied electronic engineering, and has spent her career working in applied research institutes, on projects ranging from virtual avatars to make television accessible to deaf people, to personalised food advice for helping people make healthier choices. Her current work at Sound and Vision combines her experience in the media with her knowledge of semantic technology, to unlock media archives for researchers and provide them with new insights from the data.

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