CHAIR: Leen Engelen

Anne MacLennan

Sound of the Archives: Radio in Media History

Archives are generally silent on the issue of radio archives. The archiving of sound whether originating on the radio, podcasts or elsewhere is unusual and challenging. The need for appropriate conditions for tape prior to any transfer or digitization makes the storage of older audio unappealing to archivist not only due to issues of expense, storage, and space but because they cannot be quickly viewed but listened to as well. Additionally, the radio industry and increasingly podcasting are not obligated to save their paper documentation or sound recordings, so very little is saved in the quick pace of radio moving from live to recorded shows. Frequently small commercial radio stations and community radio stations are run on shoestring budgets making the cataloging and storage of archives impossible in house. As a result, the lack of radio archives in general have plagued media historians. The well-known mystery of where CBS records have disappeared to has created a large whole in American radio history. Similarly in countries such as Canada, in particular, the lack of radio archives has tipped the research originally toward regulation and the early debate about the beginnings of the CBC. The gaps have resulted more recently in creative methodological approaches, such as oral history, but without appropriate archival storage that material will also be lost to future researchers. This work will focus on the gaps in the archival sources for radio history and podcasting, especially in Canada, accounting for the direction that writing has taken to account for the archival challenges.

Brecht Declerq, Dana Mustata and Sébastien Robillard (https://uqam.zoom.us/j/84658429475)

FIAT/IFTA: A Look Beyond Broadcast Archives

In this presentation, we highlight some of the initiatives within the International Federation of Television Archives FIAT/IFTA. In doing so, we invite media historians to join us in reflecting upon enhanced possibilities for doing archive-centered research at a time when digitization and (online) accessibility become the desired norm. FIAT/IFTA is a global network of broadcast archives founded in 1977 and joined by more than 250 members since then. Echoing arguments from D’Ignazio’s and Klein’s (2020) Data Feminism, our presentation builds upon the premise that digitized archival data and online accessibility obscures even more the power structures, cultural politics, labour conditions and organizational dynamics within which archives operate and which determine their (in)accessibility for research purposes. We argue that an understanding of the social, cultural and institutional contexts of broadcast archives – which more often than not remain unquestioned by media historians, or secondary in importance at best - is imperative for doing archive-centered research in ways that can account for the biases, social differences and inequalities that underpin access to broadcast archives and inform media historiographies.
Our presentation will zoom in on several FIAT/IFTA initiatives, such as: the Media Studies Grant, ‘Where are you on the Timeline’ survey, the ‘Save your Archive’ initiative, the Archives Awards and regional seminars that FIAT/IFTA has organized over the years. These initiatives offer insights into archival contexts that are valuable for research purposes. By highlighting these initiatives, we aim to show how contexts in which archives are produced, managed, used and valorized can function as sources of knowledge in and of themselves. Such contextual knowledge lends itself to para-archival practices of doing research that offer us broader views upon the politics of archival research in the digital era and the many ways in which archives can become symptomatic of social change, social differences and inequalities."

Nanako Ota

Examining Democracy Past and Present: A Case Study of Japanese Radio History Research utilizing NHK Archives

NHK Archives are media archives run by NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting monopoly funded by viewers’ subscription fees. In 2010, NHK Archives launched an academic access trial, giving researchers permission to use its stored radio and television programs. Although the trial has profoundly transformed media history research, its potential
contributions to the public have not been thoroughly explored.
To discuss the possibilities of NHK Archives in promoting public benefit, the presenter will first show how the archives are organized, and then explain key findings from her graduate research on Japanese radio history. In the wake of World War II, GHQ, the US occupation forces, reformed Japanese broadcasting and encouraged NHK to include the public voice to the radio as a proof of democracy, but it often reveals inequalities. For example, NHK Archives store an unedited recording of an interview episode ‘Girls Under the Railroad Tracks’; an NHK announcer talks with women in the sex trade in Yurakucho, Tokyo, where GHQ was established. The careful analysis of its transcription tells us that he often ignores their replies and persists in drawing answers he wants, calling into question the nature of democracy back then.
The presenter recently created an open-access digital archive, where the excerpts of radio programs stored at the NHK Archives are uploaded, and now works on comparing the interview programs of the occupation period and of the current by focusing on women in poverty. Through opening the usually closed process of academic research to the public
while attempting to find the parallelism of the voices from the past and the present, the presenter argues that NHK Archives will start functioning as truly accessible archives only when enabling the public to access the progress or the stagnation from the democracy in the past to the democracy they live in today."

Richard Legay

“Oh, I don’t think we have anything for you here”: Challenges and Opportunities of Studying European Commercial Radio History

While commercial radio stations such as Radio Luxembourg and Europe n°1 have had a strong impact on the audiovisual and cultural landscape of Western Europe - especially in the 60s and 70s - studying their history during this period still remains a challenge. Indeed, accessing their archives can be a particularly difficult task: as private broadcasters with a transnational dimension, these stations have built archives that strongly differ from public ones. From who is allowed in to what was kept in the first place, the differences and obstacles are numerous. Therefore, scholars interested in the history of European commercial radio have to develop alternative ways to those studying public broadcasters to build a corpus of historical sources. Focusing on research conducted on the transnational history of radio and popular culture in the Sixties, this paper will (1) introduce the challenges of working with archives of commercial radio stations, including navigating the complex network of actors involved in granting access to such archives and their interests, (2) present solutions and alternatives to official archives, such as private collections of fans, who, motivated by nostalgia, have accumulated, digitised, and shared large amounts of recordings, and, (3) show that such challenges can turn into opportunities to renew perspectives on commercial radio, notably by embracing intermediality and the study of sound.