Journal of European Television History and Culture now out

The first issue of the Journal of European Television History and Culture has now been published online.  This online, open-access journal is directly connected to the EUScreen project, and as it develops will make greater use of the online resources of EUScreen to drive a new sort of writing about television history.

At the EU Screen conference in Rome with Sonja de Leeuw, talking about Siw Malmkvist and online heritage. (Photo by Quirijn Backx)

This first issue, appropriately, is dedicated to the challenge of making sense of online documents as they become increasingly available.  Many of the essays here have their origins in the first EUScreen conference in Rome.

Taking my talk in Rome (above) as a point of departure, I had the pleasure of writing a short ‘discoveries’ piece based on my experiences of viewing this show at the Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum.  I argue that this show offers us ways of thinking about how to make national collections work to tell transnational stories.

The article builds in part on my work on Inventing Europe, as well as some of the scholarly issues this has raised.  In some ways, without my even thinking about it, I also picked up threads from the research methods that informed my book on German radio.  The idea there as well was to examine not only the ‘meat’ of programmes, but their points of transition: intros and outros, routine statements of time and place, etc. that orient the programme in the space and time of the audience.  These are the aspects of broadcasting that make visible how ‘normal’ times and geographies are constructed and negotiated.  Here, they also offer us clues as to how to think about how to go about making items from national collections make sense in a transnational environment by showing us the moments of translation in a transnational environment.

Read the whole journal – and watch the clips.  That’s the whole point.