The Media Researcher as Storyteller: Working with Digitized Audiovisual Sources

Editor's Notes

• #2: Reference to our related journal article: Berber Hagedoorn and Sabrina Sauer, ‘The Researcher as Storyteller: Using Digital Tools for Search and Storytelling with Audio-Visual (AV) Materials’, submitted for review to VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture (2018) Sharing initial results from ongoing study (work in progress); Story about interpretation i.r.t. chaos of doing media research today 'Disruptive' media events make a lot of noise. In the media they are unwieldy and difficult to interpret due to being 'scattered' across platforms, media types and wide coverage. This project focuses on how media researchers make sense of disruptive media events in narratives when coverage is diffuse and difficult to interpret. Disruptive media events, such as terrorist attacks or environmental disasters, are difficult to interpret due to an inability to grasp the story. This leads to problems for media scholars, who analyze how narratives construct different political, economic or cultural meanings around such events. Offering media scholars the ability to explore and create lucid narratives about media events therefore greatly supports their interpretative work. Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in the context of Berber Hagedoorn as Sound and Vision Researcher in Residence in 2016-2017 and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under project number CI-14-25 as part of the MediaNow project. This research was also made possible by the CLARIAH-CORE project financed by NWO. The authors would like to thank Hanne Stegeman for her research assistance during data categorization. Source of images: http://openbeelden.nl
• #3: Source of image: http://images.indianexpress.com/2015/01/quest-cartoon.jpg
• #4: Hayden White, Metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1973, p.ix.
• #5: Previous research argues that media events should always be viewed in relation to their wider political and sociocultural contexts. Events, as they unfold in the media, may correspond to long-term social phenomena, and the way in which such events are 'constructed' has particular connotations (Jiménez-Martínez, 2016). Specific actors (newscasters, governments, institutions) use media events to build narratives in line with their own political, economic or cultural purposes. Media researchers also build narratives around events; prior research underlines the importance of visualizing, constructing and storing of narratives during the information navigation to contextualize material (Akker et al., 2011; Kruijt, 2016; De Leeuw, 2012). Offering media researchers the ability to explore and create lucid narratives about media events therefore greatly supports their interpretative work.
• #7: https://berberhagedoorn.wordpress.com/research/#dissertation Berber Hagedoorn studied how television functions as a significant mediator of past and historical events in modern media systems. This dissertation studies practices of representing the past on Dutch television as a multi-platform phenomenon. Dynamic screen practices such as broadcasting, cross-media platforms, digital thematic channels and online television archives provide access to a wide range of audio-visual materials. By exploring how television's convergence with new media technologies has affected its role as a mediator of the past, this study reflects on how contemporary representations of history contribute to the construction of cultural memory. Specifically, the poetics of doing history in archive-based and documentary programming are analysed from 2000 onwards, when television professionals in the Netherlands seized the opportunity to experiment with storytelling practices made possible by the increased digitisation of archival collections and the presence of online and digital platforms. This study is founded on a textual analysis of audio-visual cases to reveal processes of meaning making, and a production studies approach to gain insight into creators' strategies of broadcasting and multi-platform storytelling in relation to historical events. Such an approach reveals distinct textual, cultural-historical and institutional aims, strategies and conventions for doing history on television, bringing power relations to the surface. This study demonstrates, first, how the selection and circulation of historical narratives and audio-visual archive materials in new contexts of television works in relation to processes of mediation, hybridity and curation, and second, how such practices help to search, preserve and perform individual and collective cultural memories. Televised histories connect viewers/users with the past and provide necessary contextual frameworks through cross-media and transmedia storytelling, demonstrating the continuing importance of stories and memories produced through televisual practices – challenging accepted versions of history. Hagedoorn, B. (2016). Doing History, Creating Memory: Representing the past in documentary and archive-based television programmes within a multi-platform landscape (Doctoral dissertation). Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
• #9: This study offers a first exploratory critique of digital tools' socio-technical affordances in terms of support for narrative creation by media researchers. We reflect on narrative creation processes of research, writing and story composition by Media Studies and Humanities scholars as well as media professionals (journalists, television/image researchers, documentary filmmakers, digital storytellers, media innovation experts) working with cross-media and audiovisual sources, and the pivotal ways in which digital tools inform these processes of search and storytelling. Our study proposes to add to the existing body of user-centered Digital Humanities research by presenting the insights of a cross-disciplinary user study. This involves, broadly speaking, researchers studying audiovisual materials in a co-creative design process, set to fine-tune and further develop a digital tool that supports audiovisual research through exploratory search. This article focuses on how researchers – in both academic as well as professional settings – use digital search technologies in their daily work practices to discover and explore (crossmedia, digital) audiovisual archival material, specifically when studying 'disruptive' media events . We focus on three user types, (1) Media Studies researchers; (2) Humanities researchers that use digitized audiovisual materials as a source for research and (3) media professionals who need to retrieve audiovisual materials for audiovisual text productions. Our study primarily provides insights into the search, retrieval and narrative creation practices of these user groups. However, a user study such as this in which qualitative methods (co-creative design sessions, focus groups, research diaries, questionnaires) are combined, affords fine-grained insights, and informs conclusions about the role of digital tools in meaning-creation processes around working with audiovisual sources.
• #11: Our study primarily provides insights into the search, retrieval and narrative creation practices of these user groups. However, a user study such as this in which qualitative methods (co-creative design sessions, focus groups, research diaries, questionnaires) are combined, affords fine-grained insights, and informs conclusions about the role of digital tools in meaning-creation processes around working with audiovisual sources. Our study further contributes to ideas about tool criticism in DH: “The 'first wave' of Digital Humanities focused on digitization and realizing technological infrastructures, whilst the second wave was generative, creating environments and tools to interact with data that is 'born digitally'. The third wave according to David Berry (2012) should concentrate on 'the underlying computationality of the forms held within a computational medium (...) to look at the digital component of the Digital Humanities in the light of its medium specificity, as a way of thinking about how media changes produce epistemic changes'.” D.M. Berry, 'Introduction: Understanding the Digital Humanities,' in Understanding Digital Humanities, D.M. Berry (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012.
• #12: We set-up co-creative design sessions with 68 media researchers (group 1: 21; group 2: 36; group 3: 11) to observe and reflect on the practices of media researchers in terms of how they interact with search tools to explore, access and retrieve digitized AV material in order to interpret, and in some cases, re-use this material in new audiovisual productions. 
• #14: Source of image: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2006/4/5947-exploratory-search/abstract
• #15: DIVE+ works with Linked Open data, which allows for alternative exploration of collections. How would this enhance your research process? Currently, DIVE+ has the search journey (exploration path) as its narrative. You can export your search narrative for later use. Would this be useful in your own research?
• #19: Narratives should be viewed in terms of their socio-technical context. We study and question the 'translation' of AV data on different platforms into the narratives that we, as media researchers, and any researcher working with AV sources, can tell – and by doing so, informs conclusions about the role of digital tools in meaning-creation processes around working with AV sources. Media researchers (both scholars and media professionals) often study and integrate in their work which cultural and political meanings are connected to 'disruptive' and long-term 'media events', and delve into how said meanings are reproduced and made sense of via television and connected media platforms.
• #20: Exploration Path 1: Using DIVE+ (Media Suite) to search for 'Watersnoodramp’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXwzejOE57A
• #30: Source of image: http://blog.quikr.com/2016/02/19/8-reasons-why-you-can-trust-quikr-unconditionally/
• #31: We made improvements in audiovisual annotation or media annotation to the exploratory search tool DIVE+
• #33: Digital tools – used to search for, annotate, and analyze events – frame and afford the narratives that both media scholars and professionals can form around their research question.