Television heritage onlineFrom accessible to participatory archives

Eggo MüllerUtrecht University

Television heritage onlineFrom accessible to participatory archives

1. A TV scholar’s true story2. A media student’s probable search3. Participation and the archive

A TV scholar’s true story

A media student’s probable search

“Blind Date”

• “YouTube has become the standard of what people expect audiovisual archives to be – unlimited access and active user participation have become crucial for an archive’s visibility and public existence.”

Rick Prelinger in Snickars/Vonderau (eds.): The YouTube Reader (2009)

The participation imperative

Jakob Nielson’s ‘90-9-1 rule’ (2006)

The participation imperative

• Democracy• Arts and culture• Talent shows • …

Participation imperative

• Traditional norm • New dimensions in digital culture• ‘Explicit’ and ‘implicit’ participation

Schäfer, Bastard Culture (2011)

Participatory archiving

• “The fundamental characteristics of the proposed approach are decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and contextualisation of both records and the entire archival process.”Isto Huliva in: Arch Sci (2008)

Participatory archiving

Shilton/Srinivasan (2007)

“Dynarchive” (Ernst 2010)

• based on user participation• aiming at cultures of minorities• “grassroots cataloguing, folksonomies, social

tagging”• “on-going, iterative and emergent ontology-

building process”• “scalable and sustainable participatory

archive”Shilton/Srinivasan (2007)

TensionsARCHIVE DYNARCHIVEprofessionals crouwd/userscreator-centered user-centeredquality popularitygatekeeping participationtaxonomy folksonomycontextualisation appropriationinterpretation consumptionheritage nostalgiaRead-only memeory write-also memory

Perspectives

• Harvesting traces of implicit participation• Responding to users’ requests• Engaging communities in the archival process• Creating portals for interactive archiving• Defining norms for amateur archivists • ‘Crowdsourcing’ and networked knowledge