Audiovisual Archiving

ASA-SHS est un projet de recherche financé par l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). Il porte sur la conception et le développement expérimental d'un environnement de travail pour une analyse sémantique riche de corpus audiovisuels documentant la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales. Outre des outils d'analyse (de description et d'indexation), cet environnement intègre également une plateforme de publication en ligne de corpus audiovisuels préalablement, analysés et indexés.

Le rapport présente les grandes lignes du projet ASA-SHS: contenu, objectifs, résultats concrets visés, périmètres, organisation du travail et calendrier.

En la actualidad, la preservación audiovisual se ha convertido en uno de los pilares fundamentales de lo audiovisual, rompiendo con la tradicional tríada compuesta por la producción, la distribución y la exhibición. Muchas las experiencias y aceleradas transformaciones que han tenido lugar en este área en las últimas décadas han sido plasmadas en artículos, libros, catálogos, trabajos académicos y páginas de Internet, que han abordado el fenómeno en todas sus posibilidades -incluyendo restauración, curaduría, construcción de espacios adecuados de preservación audiovisual e, incluso, organización administrativa y financiera de archivos y laboratorios-, constituyéndose en una conquista imprescindible en el campo de los estudios fílmicos en América Latina. Haciéndose eco de estos novedosos y estimulantes trabajos, el dossier "La preservación audiovisual en América Latina", coordinado por Andrea Cuarterolo y Mateus Nagime busca recoger algunas de las experiencias y reflexiones más recientes en torno a esta temática surgidas en la región durante el período de aceleradas transformaciones que sobrevino al llamado "giro digital". ¿Cómo estructurar un dossier que aborde un tema tan amplio en un espacio tan extenso como América Latina? Sin pretender, de ningún modo, proveer un panorama completo o abarcador sobre el tópico abordado, los trabajos incluidos en el presente monográfico presentan tanto análisis generales sobre la preservación audiovisual -ya sea a nivel regional como local- como estudios de caso, que tienen como objetivo reflexionar sobre las problemáticas, perspectivas y avances de los archivos latinoamericanos, con un espíritu de diálogo y cooperación. El dossier incluye artículos de Laura Bezerra, Pamela Gionco, Tiago Castro Gomes, Mónica Villarroel Marquez, Isabel Wschebor y Rafael de Luna. Contiene, además, una reseña de Constanza Grela del libro coordinado por Carolina Cappa Nitrato argentino y  dos entrevistas: una a Viviana García Besne realizada por Silvana Noelia Flores y otra a Carlos Roberto de Souza a cargo de Mateus Nagime.

These Memoriav recommendations have been drawn up by a cross-sectoral working group, reviewed by the Memoriav Video Competence Network and edited and prepared for publication by Memoriav, the Association for the preservation of the audiovisual heritage of Switzerland.
The focus of these recommendations is on dealing with digital data of an audiovisual nature. This document is intended to provide guidance and advice on digitization and digital archiving for archivists and curators of collections. It may also be of interest to those in the media production sector as well as anyone submitting project applications to Memoriav, who will be able to find criteria for the long-term preservation of digital audiovisual documents here.

The 20th century saw various approaches to expanded cinema performance, including color organs and mixed media "psychedelic" light shows. These practices were difficult to document technically and were, to various extents, based on performance in the moment. Technically, archival 20th century visual performance documentation and preservation ranges from the non-existent to the surprisingly future proofed. But expanded cinema historian William Moritz summed up the unrepeatability of performance experience in a 1969 review of the mixed media performance ensemble Single Wing Turquoise Bird: "always only once." Contemporary performative digital practice shares some parallels with these earlier performative practices: the work may be performed live by a performer, or an algorithm may perform the work automatically. In either case, preservation faces the paradox of recreating moments that were intended to happen "always only once." Examining 20th century attempts to preserve the ephemeral can inform not only how we approach preservation of performative and process-based digital works, but also which works we attempt to preserve.

I hope I'll be forgiven, at the outset, for stating something that is obvious to me now but for most of my 35 year career as a film and sound archivist was not obvious at all. That is that people in our profession spend a lot of time researching and describing what we do, and how we do it, but why we do it tends to get a much lighter brush, if indeed it's not ignored altogether. The assumptions, principles and values on which our work is based easily get taken for granted. Because we assume them to be self evident, we tend not to articulate them. And that, in turn, can potentially put us and our institutions in a very risky position.

Resumen

A partir de identificar la documentación que configura la visibilidad de los actores cómicos dentro de un acervo de imágenes, se reflexiona acerca de los aspectos que construyen una metodología de descripción en un acervo fílmico. Se presentan las categorías tradicionales en las que se separan nombres de películas, actores y el lugar que ocupan los actores secundarios y de cuadro, a partir de la identificación de sus gestos, actitudes y relaciones humorísticas en las escenas de películas retratadas por fotógrafos de
stills.
Así, se muestran las especificaciones de este proceso en el acervo iconográfico de la Cineteca Nacional desde un análisis de lo archivístico como discurso significante.
Palabras clave: archivo fílmico, Cineteca Nacional, gestos, actores secundarios.
Abstract:
From identify documentation that sets the visibility of the comic actors in a film archive, we reflect on aspects that build a methodology for describing images.
Traditional categories in which films and actors names are placed from identifying their gestures, attitudes and relationships in the film portrayed by stillmans are presented as part of a significant process. The specifications of this process are described thinking in the Cineteca Nacional’s iconographic collection. The analysis takes the archival as significant speech.
Key words: film archive, Cineteca Nacional, gestures, supporting roles

This paper gives a detailed overview of the archived language documentation materials for the two languages spoken in northern Ambrym, Vanuatu: North Am-brym and Fanbyak. I discuss the speakers and the language situation in northern Ambrym to give readers an introduction to the culture of the area. The archived materials encompass five different research projects focussing on the two languages , including documentation and literacy development projects. Data collection , workflows, file-naming conventions, and community involvement are all discussed. The deposited materials are described along with overviews of the different genres, sub-genres, and keywords to enable users to navigate and discover relevant recordings.

In this paper, an ontology for the description and indexing of the contents of audiovisual resources will
be presented. The concerned domain of reference (or: knowledge domain) is the cultural heritage of
minorities and indigenous people, hence the name or title of this ontology, PCI ontology (standing for the
French “Patrimoine Culturel de Minorités et Peuples Indigènes”). The whole audiovisual corpus can be
accessed and explored on the PCI audiovisual web portal (figure 1): http://semioweb.mshparis.fr/corpus/pci/fr/

The article covers the action of film archives in Latin America during the military dictatorships that have occurred on the continent during the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, we seek to study the behavior of the Latin American cinematographic field not by the actions of the filmmakers, as is usually approached by historiography, but by the area of audiovisual preservation. We will study in particular the case of the Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro and the figure of its director, Cosme Alves Netto, during the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).

In short, the central question here is that of the semiotic structure of (digital) media data, i.e. the structural organization of (digital) media data, their status and function(s) for a given user or community of users and of how to deal with them, how to work concretely with them in order to achieve not only theoretical but also practical-educational, economical or other-objectives. 2/ some major challenges exemplified through the French ARA program With regard to this general challenge we call the semiotic processing of digital media objects, we would like to introduce and present here briefly the French programme Audiovisual Research Archives (ARA) 1 we have started in 2001 in Paris. This archive actually recovers more than 6000 hours of online streamed videos, accessible for everybody, covering a large diversity of disciplines in human and social sciences. The records composing the ARA corpus contain individual interviews with researchers, conferences, lectures, research seminars, workshops, small reportages about the daily life in research labs, scientific expositions, documentaries, travelogs and road movies, ethnographical films and field work recordings. The offer is composed of almost 270 research seminars, symposia and workshops as well as of more than 380 interviews with researchers and experts in social and human sciences. More than 2800 researchers, scholars and professionals from 80 countries have contributed to the cultural and scientific heritage stored and diffused through the ARA portal. Even if half of all videos are in French language, there also exist large corpora of videos in English, Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese or Russian. The average growth per month of this audiovisual archive is of about 30 hours on line, this means of about 60 hours of video taking and digitizing.

Premier guide (conçu et rédigé en 2005) pour une analyse systématique du contenu de données audiovisuelles enregistrées, traitées et diffusées sur les portails du programme de recherche "Archives Audiovisuelles de la Recherche" (AAR).
Principaux types de description/d'analyse:
1) Description paratextuelle.
2) Description textuelle.
3) Description pragmatique.
4) Description péritextuelle.
5) Description par mots clés.
6) Description référentielle.
7) Description rhétorique.
8) Description narrative.
9) Description-traduction.
10 Parcours de description.

Campus AAR est un projet de R&D français financé par l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) qui a démarré en janvier 2014 pour une durée de 36 mois. Le projet porte sur la mise en place d'un démonstrateur d’un environnement numérique pour la production, description/indexation et publication d’archives audiovisuelles.

This paper considers various challenges, implications and pedagogical opportunities presented via a small-scale audio archiving project: School of Music RePlayed. Housed in the Australian National University's School of Music, this historical archive of more than twelve hundred recital and concert tapes features multiple recordings of historical significance, yet presents a number of issues pertaining to storage and tape deterioration. This paper first considers the challenges presented in the digitization of such an archive before focusing on the pedagogical opportunities afforded by such a unique project. Developed and run in conjunction with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, this project addresses both technological and pedagogical matters of preservation, heritage and digitization.

This  presentation reports on some of the results obtained during the documentation and audiovisual archiving project of Dagbon music-dance culture in the Northern Region of Ghana. We describe the digitisation and contextualisation of the data and meta data under the DEKKMMA-Project. The aim of the project was to record, catalogue and map out a large portion of the not yet documented music-dance culture found in the traditional idiom of music making in Dagbon. By integrating this documentation project at the Africa Museum (RMCA) in Belgium through the DEKKMMA platform,  we made a wealth of unpublished material available online for researchers, institutes of learning and the general public. The documentation project is based on long-term fieldwork in the Northern Region of Ghana during the period 1999 – 2010. The audiovisual recordings during these annual field trips include ethnographic materials, artifacts, musical instruments, dance costumes, regalia used during music-dance performances, coming both from the rural areas and from “The Hiplife Zone”, the urban space in and around Tamale. Exemplifying the rich cultural heritage of contemporary Ghana and Dagbon music-dance tradition in particular, this audio-visual collection is not only catalogued and archived at the Ethnomusicological Archive of the RMCA in Tervuren, Belgium, but also locally at the Institute of African Studies University of Ghana, Legon, for perpetuity. The end of the paper presents a case study on how the Dagbon audiovisual collection is applied for new innovative ethnomusicological research and analyses at the University of Ghent, Belgium, in the idiom of embodied music interaction and African musicology.

Le Guide "Evénement 2013" permet la collecte systématique de toutes les informations et données nécessaires à la publication en ligne d’un événement sur les sites portail du Programme Archives Audiovisuelles de la Recherche (AAR) de l'ESCoM (Equipe Sémiotique Cognitive et Nouveaux Médias) de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (MSH) à Paris. Le terme événement est considéré, dans le cadre du Programme AAR, dans un sens très large et recouvre des « terrains de tournage » les plus divers comme, par exemple :
1. les événements de nature scientifique et éducative (conférences, séminaires et cours, colloques, tables rondes, journées d’étude, etc.);
2. les événements de nature artistique (concerts, expositions, mises en scène, spectacles vivants, etc.);
3. les événements de nature sociale (manifestations, fêtes, rituels, événements relevant de la vie quotidienne, etc.);
4. mais aussi, bien sûr, les « terrains » à proprement parler d’enquête, de recherche (ethnographique, linguistique, sociologique, etc.).

Le Guide "Evénement 2013" est composé de 8 Fiches à renseigner en vue de la publication d’un événement sur les sites portails du Programme AAR :
Fiche 1 : informations signalétiques (identification de l’événement).
Fiches 2 à 4 : personnes et/ou institutions qui organisent ou qui signent, responsables de l’événement à publier.
Fiches 5 à 7 : participants dont l’image sera publiée sur les sites portails du Programme AAR et leurs contributions.
Fiche 8 : informations relatives à d’autres éléments à filmer et à publier sur les sites portails du Programme AAR.

The Unión de Cinematecas de América Latina (UCAL) is created with the aim of giving visibility and articulation to Latin American film archives. Then, UCAL undergoes a process of incorporating the third-world discourse, in line with the formulation and consolidation of the New Latin American Cinema (NCL), which causes dissent in its midst at a given time. In the 1980s, faced with a different socio-political situation and audiovisual preservationist thought, it was decided to end UCAL. Our objective is to raise hypotheses and postulate questions, such as the relationship between UCAL and NCL, the impact of the socio-political scenario on our film archives and the debate on heritage in Latin America during the context of the dictatorships, for a study on the historical trajectory of the Unión de Cinematecas de América Latina (1965-1984).

A Unión de Cinematecas de América Latina (UCAL) é criada com o objetivo de dar visibilidade e articulação às cinematecas latino-americanas. Em seguida, a UCAL sofre um processo de incorporação do discurso terceiro-mundista, em sintonia com a formulação e consolidação do Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (NCL), o que ocasiona dissidências em seu seio em um determinado momento. Nos anos 1980, diante de uma outra conjuntura sociopolítica e de pensamento preservacionista audiovisual, opta-se por findar a UCAL. O nosso objetivo é levantar hipóteses e postular questões, como a relação entre a UCAL e o NCL, o impacto do cenário sociopolítico em nossas cinematecas e o debate sobre patrimônio na América Latina durante o contexto das ditaduras, para um estudo sobre a trajetória histórica da Unión de Cinematecas de América Latina (1965-1984).

1 May 2015. So you think you might want to be an audiovisual archivist but you’re not exactly sure what that entails. To help you better decide if this is the right career path (before you go and invest your time and money) we have laid out some of the basics that you should know about the field, such as the current professional climate, educational expectations, and how the profession is expected to develop....

May 2015. The ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation is a practical introduction to caring for and preserving audio collections. It is aimed at individuals and institutions that have recorded sound collections but lack the expertise in one or more areas to preserve them.

To-day, we witness the massive digitization of any kind of media objects, the storing and diffusion of it in form of digital (multimedia) libraries, archives or any other form of digital “(multimedia) information spaces”. The general policy is to make available the enormous quantities of media data in form of relevant (critical) knowledge or knowledge resources for a target public – a person, a social group, an institution (this policy underlies the shift from an “information society to a knowledge society” as proclaimed, for instance, in the Lisbon 2001 Declaration or again in the actual Europe 2020 program). However if we want to progress in this historically and culturally certainly highly exciting and innovative direction, a series of serious – technical, social and scientific – problems has to be solved.

One of the most complex ones is without any doubt the question of how to process the symbolic or the meaning of (digital) media data with respect to a given – analogically speaking - market place of meaning production, sharing and consumption (potential users of meaning, cultural expectations of meaning, needs and desires of meaning, uses and exploitations of meaning, added value of specific forms of meaning …). Indeed:

… a (digital) media data (a still image, a video, a sound record, an oral record, a printed document, …) is not in itself already a genuine cognitive resource for a given “reader” or “community of readers”, that will say a relevant “means” for an agent to solve a problem, to answer a question or again to satisfy a (personal or collective) goal or a need.

A digital media data is, in other terms, only a potential cognitive resource. It has to “undergo” more or less significant qualitative transformations in order to become a user or a user community relevant one. These qualitative transformations are performed through series of concrete operations such as the constitution and classification of relevant corpora of digital records, the description and indexing of records, the processing of digital data (segmentation, tagging, linking, montage, …), the (cultural, linguistic) versioning (commenting, translating, …) of given source records or again the (re-)publishing of digital records.

These and other operations constitute what we call the semiotic processing of (digital) media objects, corpora of (digital) media objects or again entire archives and libraries. They demonstrate practically and theoretically the well-known “from data to meta-data” or the “from (simple) information to (relevant) knowledge” problem – problem that obviously determines the effective use and also the future of digital knowledge archives.

In short, the central question here is that of the semiotic structure of (digital) media data, i.e. the structural organization of (digital) media data, their status and function(s) for a given user or community of users and of how to deal with them, how to work concretely with them in order to achieve not only theoretical but also practical - educational, economical or other - objectives.

Full article available online: http://lcn.revuesonline.com/article.jsp?articleId=20254

Il contributo, attraverso l'approfondimento delle produzioni sperimentali di Monica Saviron e Radha May propone un recupero della riflessione sugli approcci archeologici tra media, immagini e pratiche artistiche di rigenerazione creativa di archivi.

Mónica Savirón è un’artista sperimentale ibero-americana tra video e cinema ma è anche curatrice indipendente e autrice di molti interventi su avanguardie cinematografiche e artists’ cinema per sostenere soprattutto una rete di artist* ai margini. I brevi lavori filmici presi in esame, prodotti di lunghe ricerche, (Broken Tongue, 2013; Wedding Song, 2016; Answer Print, 2016) sono stati esposti nel mondo, in forma di proiezioni e videoinstallazioni, ottenendo premi e riconoscimenti. Con un approccio poetico ricompongono narrativamente la tangibilità dei processi tecnici che investono l’inscrizione, la conservazione e la proiezione di pellicole, suoni e immagini mettendo al centro dinamiche e storie invisibili.

When The Towel Drops Vol 1 di Rhada May, invece, è un progetto di ricerca artistica transnazionale che in cinque modalità e momenti diversi esplora materiali filmici censurati o tacciati di immoralità rielaborandoli in luoghi periferici per riflettere sulla rappresentazione del piacere e la sessualità femminile nei film del secondo Novecento. Questo lavoro, in più tappe, si compone attraverso film installation, performance e wiki digitali. Rhada May è un’artista che si identifica con Elisa Giardina-Papa (di origine siciliana), Nupur Mathur (New Delhi) e Bathsheba Okwenje (Kampala, Uganda).

This  article  aims  to  lay  the  groundwork  for  an analysis of formation of Unión de Cinematecas de América Latina (UCAL). Created in 1965, the UCAL aims to give visibility  and  coordination  to  the  young  Latin  American "lm  archives.  In  turn,  the  second  half  of  the  1960s  can be  interpreted  as  the  ideological  consolidation  of  the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (NCL), which also puts into question  the  role  of  an "lm  archive  in  our  subcontinent. Starting  from  the  re!ections  of  Borde  and  Correa  Junior on the history of "lm archives, we aim to analyze the Latin American  case  because  we  understand  the  discussion  of the  institution  “"lm  archive”  as  fundamental  for  studies on  cinema  in  Latin  America,  especially  to  help  to  a  less homogenizing view of the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano.

The Phonoarchive of the Institute of Musicology SASA: Historical Sound Records in Digital Era, Rastko Jakovljevic (ed.),
Fonoarhiv Muzikološkog instituta SANU: Istorijski zvučni zapisi u digitalnog eri, Institute of Musicology SASA, Belgrade, 2014.
ISBN 978-86-80639-18-5
Editor: Rastko Jakovljevic
Co-Authors: Jelena Jovanovic, Danka Lajic-Mihajlovic, Marija Dumnic

This paper will explore the interface between the digital environment, and the sound archive's fundamental responsibilities to collect, preserve and provide access. It will focus on specific issues connected with ethnomusicological materials.

For the past six years my PhD by project (part time) has been to research and develop the schema required for the establishment of an online digital archive/repository designed to house the screen production outputs of the staff and students of ASPERA member institutions. In conducting this research a number of key issues facing the archive sector, and moving image archives in particular, have been identified.

As all information agencies begin to grapple with the largely logistical issues emerging from the impending ‘digital deluge’ the very nature of the role that the moving image archive plays within the contemporary audio-visual landscape is under increasing scrutiny. The sheer volume of data produced with each born digital audio-visual title means the issues of collection policy and curatorship, search-ability and accessibility together with preservation strategy become even more imperative.

This paper outlines my progress to date and examines a number of the historical, theoretical and philosophical perspectives underpinning the notion of the contemporary moving image archive with particular reference as to how these might influence the establishment of the ASPERA online digital archive.

The paper introduces the history of the Audiovisual Research Collection for Performing Arts (ARCPA) and its relevance to the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and to the recognition of intangible knowledge represented in creative arts. Some challenges of ARCPA's actual situation as well as concrete outcomes from the viewpoint of the recordist, the researcher, and the archivist will be discussed. Further, the team wants to promote the idea of implementing basic knowledge on archiving procedures and principles into undergraduate and graduate studies across Southeast Asia in order to increase awareness towards media sensibility and responsibility regarding audiovisual documents used in research and serving the collective memory of the communities concerned.

The paper discusses the changing self-understanding of ethnomusicologists from enthu siasts pioneering in forgotten areas of the world to a species of networking researchers using all facilities of the World Wide Web and audiovisual databases. Aside from some unclear interpretations of user rights, there are important ethical challenges to observe, which are based on a fast re-positioning of humanities in the actual field of scientific efficiency. What will remain from the sublime discoverer's attitude and what will be the substance of another quality in ethnomusicological research? Talking about the "digital butterfly net" we should focus on what we call a "butterfly" and how it changes its shape, rather than re-examine its digital being. Finally we have to re-examine our supposedly universal parameters of "scientific efficiency" from different viewpoints, and we should become aware of prospective demands which need to be met by audiovisual archivists and ethnomusicologists in their socio-functional context.