CHAIR: Leen Engelen 

Shingo Sato

Journalists as Archived Self

With the development of digital archives, the diverse testimonies of the survivors from various historical events are now stored on the Internet and open to the public. These testimonies are interviews by sociologists, students and most commonly journalists. This presentation attempts to reevaluate journalism in the context of the “digital archival society”. In this presentation, I introduce the original concept “journalists as archived self” and theorize what it means for journalists to be archived. Traditionally, journalists have been hidden behind news texts and audiences have difficulty recognizing them. “Journalists as archived self”, however, are stored on the Internet and visible to all. In this era, we can analyze how to construct testimonies by the interaction between survivors and journalists. In addition, I focus on two specific digital archives: the NHK War Testimony Archives and Hiroshima Archive. NHK Archive is directed by The Japan Broadcasting Corporation and includes many interviews with NHK reporters on the Asia-Pacific War. Hiroshima Archive was designed to convey the reality of Atomic bombings of Hiroshima. Interviewers from the former archive are professional journalists and in the latter one are high school students. By comparing these two archives, it is possible to clarify what it means for a professional journalist to listen to testimonies as compared to the general public. Moreover, “digital archival society” can be defined as the society in which everyone is able to behave like journalists and in which the testimonies recorded by these people are accumulating.

Juliette De Maeyer, Brecht Deseure and Florence Le Cam

From the wire to the library: a media archeological inquiry into news agencies archives at KBR

The depots of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) contain a massive, albeit little-known, collection of reports from Belga, the Belgian national news agency, and Associated Press. To visit the collection, one has to find one’s way to a closed, windowless room at the bottom of a flight of stairs, hidden deeply within the labyrinthine, multi-storied depot building. There, 9,000 bound volumes (and an unknown quantity of unbound stacked A4 paper sheets) contain over 3 million pages, spanning the years 1954-1995. The collection is very little known and its relevance seems to have been contested from within KBR itself. Nevertheless it represents an important and underrated media archive. Building on works (e.g. Robertson, 2004) that suggest that archives are not neutral repositories, but instead transform the objects that they capture, we ask the following questions: what is the press agencies archive at KBR and how did the “transformative practices of archival rationalization” (Roberston, 2004, p. 454) of this specific collection came to be? In a media archeological (Ernst, 2012; Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011) approach, we will question both the materiality of this archive and the act of archiving itself (Moor & Uprichard, 2014). At a time of renewed interest in press archiving thanks to various digitization efforts (Bunout et al, 2022; Bingham, 2010), content produced by press agencies presents particular challenges that have rarely been explored from a media studies perspective (except for Aubert, 2003): the amount of reports is massive, their nature is fundamentally ephemeral and unstable (Palmer, 1996) and their existence as documents is frail as they primarily exist through circulation (Gieber, 1956) and reproduction. This presentation will specifically rely on an immersion into the archival site (visually documented through video and photographs) as well as interviews with key actors at KBR and Belga, to look at the logics of this archive’s construction and interrogate becoming as a specific form of “paper knowledge” (Gitelman, 2014).

Lance Watsky

Historic Newsreels of Quebec and Montreal from the Paramount and American Pathé Newsreel Collections

"The Sherman Grinberg Film Library, located in Los Angeles, California, is the home of the historic Paramount and American Pathé newsreels, a motion picture collection with a date range from 1897 to 1957. Through digitization, the film collection that was stored in film vaults since the early 1960’s are now part of the over 49,000 historic film clips easily accessible on the company website for students, teachers, and researchers to watch and download at no cost, and more footage is added daily. Colleagues who work for the Library of Congress say the collection is of the highest level of research value and yet most people have never seen the footage; even historians and scholars are amazed to learn that the films have been carefully preserved and are now available.    “I have been a Media Archivist for almost 30 years, but I am not a historian,” says Lance Watsky, Manager of Media Archives and Licensing. “So, I truly appreciate sharing this historic footage with peoples and communities who understand its importance.” At the conference, Watsky will provide a history of Sherman Grinberg and the Paramount and Pathé newsreel collections and explain how the Sherman Grinberg Film Library acquired the collection. He will also discuss how the Grinberg Team has been working through the restoration and digitization of the collection. Further, Watsky will present examples of the historic footage from the collection and show how the library collaborates with schools, museums, libraries, archives all over the world so more people are able to learn about the collection and use the footage in the classroom, for research, and for production. It is only through collaboration with students, teachers, filmmakers, and researchers, that these films find their way back into communities where they were filmed and will have the deepest impact."

Lucia Santa Cruz

In the future, News archives will no longer be accessible

Humanities research usually relies on journalistic material as documental data. Even if some of these studies use digital material, retrieved from the internet, they were originally physical outlets. But the media environment today is changing and becoming virtual. To a certain extent, data becomes more accessible since it is online. Recent research conducted in Brazil revealed some challenges in this scenario. The study compared how Brazilian newspapers reported the country's independence celebration throughout different historical periods. Brazil got independent from Portugal on September 7th, 1822. The research compared how Brazilian newspapers talked about independence in 1922, the year of its centenary, with the approach of Brazilian digital journalistic outlets at the bicentenary in 2022. To collect data from 1922, we used the digitalized archives of Biblioteca Nacional (the most ancient Brazilian library) available online. Periodicals are organized by title, year, publication city, and keywords. The corpus was consistent, reliable, and accessible. The situation differs from collecting 2022 data. First, we tried to use Google News, a tool from Google Company that aggregates news from sources all over the world. We customized it to select stories about the bicentennial at these ten digital outlets and send them daily. But the daily email only contained the headlines. To read the articles, we had to click on the links. But the content was blocked by the news firewall. In the future, will it be possible to research media history? How will researchers access news archives? Will digital news compromise journalistic and historical research? Besides that, there is another question: Since a published story may have several daily updates, will it be possible to distinguish those different versions? News articles are documental data for humanities research. To what extent does this information treatment will affect social science in the future?