Media History Digital Library Launches Lantern

Thanks to the folks at the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), media historians have fulltext online access to classic media periodicals and books in the public domain. Lantern is their newly launched search platform for this impressive collection containing digital scans of over 800,000 pages (and growing), from 1904 to 1963. The project is made possible by owners of the materials who loan them for scanning and donations to support the cost of scanning.

Materials in the MDHL, available for free viewing and free download, include:

▽  Business Screen (1938-1973)

▽  The Film Daily (1918-1948)

▽  International Photographer (1929-1941)

▽  Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1916-1949)

▽  Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1950-1954)

▽  The Educational Screen (1922-1962)

▽  Motion Picture [Magazine] (1914-1941)

▽  Moving Picture World (1907-1919)

▽  Photoplay (1914-1940)

▽  Radio Age: Research, Manufacturing, Communications, Broadcasting, Television (1942-1957)

▽  Radio Broadcast (1922-1930)

▽  Sponsor (1946-1964)

▽  Talking Machine World (1906-1928)

▽  Variety (1905-1926)

You can keep up with DHDL by signing up to receive Blog posts alerts from the site.

Audiovisual Citation Guidelines

The British Universities Film & Video Council has just launched the most comprehensive set of guidelines for citing audiovisual materials to date. As authors of the guide point out, "existing guidelines for the referencing of moving image and sound are often insufficient as they are based on standards developed for the written word."

 
This 19-page guide, Audio-Visual Citation: BUFVC Guidelines for Referencing Moving Image and Sound, provides examples of how to cite feature films versus feature films on DVD or with DOI access online, extracts from features, extra feature documentary material from DVD titles, amateur films from private collections, film trailers accessed online, artist installation film, television accessed from DVDs or online or as part of online archive, advertisements accessed online.  You get the idea. Radio too. Music downloads, podcasts. Also new media examples of user-generated content, online-only programs and games.

“This guide now makes it possible for any writer (even a student) to lead their readers to the exact audiovisual source they are discussing"--John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts, Royal Holloway,  University of London 

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Good news on the database front, Penn Libraries has just signed on to the Entertainment IndustryMagazine Archive. It sits in the Proquest suite of databases that you are already familiar with if you search key social science databases (Sociological Abstracts, IBSS, etc.), Digital Dissertations, or any of the historical newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. so it will be easy to get find as well as combine with broader searching.

EIMA covers core US and UK trade magazines in film, music, broadcasting and theater. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews. I guess the biggest omission in this collection is Rolling Stone. That being said:

This database includes several trade magazines which have effectively provided the main historical record for their subject areas throughout the 20th century, such as Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000). Although these titles focus primarily on film, music, TV/radio and theatre respectively, they have between them covered the full range of popular entertainments throughout their history, from music halls, circuses and fairs to jukeboxes, gambling machines and computer games.

For students of popular music, the UK music press titles New Musical Express (1946-2000) and Melody Maker (1926-2000) are equally invaluable sources: from their origins as trade papers for working musicians, they grew into mass-circulation weeklies in the 1960s, and pioneered serious rock journalism in the late 1960s and 70s. A selection of more specialist magazines give in-depth coverage of musical genres and eras, such as 'British Invasion' pop (Rave, 1964-70), reggae, African and Caribbean music (The Beat, 1982-2000), or the rave scene (Mixmag, 1983-2000).

Bringing these titles together in a single database gives researchers the opportunity to find comprehensive information on specific films, plays, theaters, actors, directors, TV series, film studios, musicians, genres, record labels, subcultures and youth movements. The inclusion of consumer and fan magazines such as Picturegoer (1911-1960), American Film (1975-1992) and Musician (1976-1999) means that a single search can bring back industry news items, features on technological breakthroughs and in-depth interviews with major artists, together with photographs and illustrations, gossip columns, listings, reviews, charts and statistics. Items such as advertisements, covers and short reviews of films, music singles or other works have been treated as separate documents with accurately-captured titles in order to help researchers find all the relevant material for their search topic.  --Proquest description

Introducing Metamedia

Check out a new site, Metamedia, on the Annenberg Library homepage (in the section Visual/Multimedia).
 
Here you will find over 600 movies about communication as it is situated in some form of media--television, radio, the telephone, photographs, the internet, recorded music, etc. These are movies in which media (including codes of communication) are central or catalytic to the story and/or main characters in the story represent media practitioners, professional or amateur. Metamedia includes fictional films as well as documentaries. And it includes world cinema as well as Hollywood.

The site also includes a Discussion Board for readers to makes comments and suggestions. The site can be a sort of community project. The current list of films is by no means complete so I look forward to urgings for must-adds, why isn't _________ on the list???

Access to films featured in Metamedia varies. If the entry includes a link to VCat, that means it's available at Penn--usually Van Pelt or Annenberg though there are a few other movie collections on campus. The list also includes titles that we don't have at Penn, in which case there will be a link to IMBD or a website that sells (or at least has more information about) the title.

I think the site is fairly easy to tool around in. There are 51 topical areas if you are looking for specific themes or genres. You may be looking for only documentaries, or only movies about radio, or you want to get out of the United States (click on World). Here are the topics: Advertising * Art * Biography * Cartoons/Animation * Celebrity * Children/Youth * Communication disorders * Communication-General * Computers/New Media * Consumerism *Copyright/Intellectual property * Crime * Disaster/Risk communication * Documentary * Election campaigns * Environmental communication * Film/Filmmaking * Free Speech/Censorship * Gaming * Health communication * Information Interview * Journalism * Language * Mass media * Media-Amateur/Grassroots *Media ethics * Media violence * Minorities-Racial/Ethnic * Minorities-Sexual * Music/Recording industry * Newspapers * Non-Verbal communication / Photography * Political communication * Pornography * Privacy/Surveillance * Public relations/Persuasion * Public space  * Religion * Radio * Representation * Sports * Supernatural communication * Telephonic Communication * Television * War * World * Women/Gender * Writing/Publishing

American Film Scripts Online

Introducing a new addition to Penn Libraries e-resources: American Film Scripts Online. ASO contains over a thousand American movie scripts from 1903 to 2006. Many scripts carry additional detailed, fielded information on scenes and characters in the scripts. The database includes facsimile images for over half of the collection. Most of the scripts have never been published before and are available nowhere else online.

Scripts were selected by a team of film librarians and scholars. Selection factors include if the film or screenplay won a major award, if the film was critically acclaimed, or the screenplay has historical or sociological significance. The panel tried to build specific clusters based around genres such as Film Noir, Silent Movies of the 1920's, and key writers. Where possible, shooting scripts selected rather than draft scripts.

There is advanced searching capability for this relatively small database so it's easy to get around, including inside the scripts to search on words and phrases. My search on the the phrase "train robbery" turned up five scripts. You can try something more imaginative.

Introducing Ethnographic Video Online

A new resource just added to the Penn Libraries homepage, Ethnographic Video Online, provides access to a collection of over 1,000 films for the study of study of human culture and behavior, covering every region of the world, and featuring the work of many of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century. EVO Iicludes interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, and more. Thematic areas such as language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, and sex, gender, and family roles can all be studied cross-culturally.

Database features include:

• uniquely powerful browse and search capabilities enabled by Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing™
• multiple points of access—browses, searches, thumbnail images, transcripts — allowing you to find your point of interest in hundreds of hours of video within seconds
• synchronized, searchable transcripts
• video clip-making tools
• annotated playlists—you can make, annotate, and share playlists for course or individual use, and you can include links to materials or resources outside of the collection to make this your one-stop resource
• high quality, licensed, in-copyright material plus newsreel and other valuable footage
• the ability to create synchronized annotations and multi-media presentations
• an embeddable video player and playlist for use on a class Web site, library home page, or an electronic syllabus—lets you drive usage and deliver content to users where and when they need it without instructions or countless screens and clicks
• streaming, quickly accessible online video at 400 and 800 kbps with no delays and no special equipment (just Flash and a browser)

November CommQuote

Michael Hirschorn, writing for The Atlantic, discusses a somewhat forgotten filmmaker, Peter Watkins, who "anticipated our modern media madness." He describes:

"...the uncanny way his films, most of them dating back to the '60s and '70s, presage the contemporary cultural and political [media] landscape--from Fox News to The Daily Show, from reality TV to the coverage of the Iraq War...Watkins specializes in historical and current-affairs re-creations, but his real subject has always been the media...Watkins' later films ratchet up the intensity of his media critique, dropping the contemporary press into wildly anachronistic environments. In his last film, the six-hour (!), French-language La Commune (Paris 1871), rival networks cover the events of that March as if they're fodder for your local news, complete with man-in-the-street interviews and expert commentary from bow-tied men a stutter step away from the ex-generals who fanned out across the airwaves in the month after the 2003 Iraq invasions, rationalizing the fiasco thousands of miles away."
--Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, "He Saw It Coming," November, 2008

La Commune (Paris 1871) and five other Watkins films are available for check-out from Van Pelt Library. See listing with descriptions in VCat.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement on Fair Use

The latest issue of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Cinema Journal carries a detailed explanation/interpretation of the Library of Congress' exemption allowing film and media studies professors to create digital clips from legally-obtained DVDs housed in college and university libraries. These may be used in the classroom or on electronic courseware sites as long as such activity is restricted to matriculaters and measures are taken to thwart copying and downloading of the material. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement of Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching for Film and Media Educators makes for a good reference for practitioners and librarians alike. The exemption lasts until Oct. 29, 2009, at which point it may be renewed.

December CommQuote

This month's quote comes from a fascinating essay in Cultural Studies Review (Volume 12, Number 1, 2006) by Ross Gibson titled "The Rise of Digital Multimedia Systems." The essay echoes Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel , the classic treatise on why the novel emerged in the beginning of the 18th century as such an influential "technology." Ross summarizes: "By studying how aesthetic and semantic systems engage with the intellect and the sensorium of the user, you can understand the temper of the times. When a new form of art or a popular mode of communication arises and takes hold, it reflects changes that have recently occurred or are presently occurring in psychology and society." This applies to the novel, but Ross extends the premise to what replaced the novel, cinema, followed by digital multimedia.

"A definitive characteristic of the movies is the way they 'lock off' their several dynamic parts into a final version, the 'release print.' This ultimate inflexibility of cinema is similar to the way most national-scale communities responded to the turbulence of modernity by insisting that their societies first synchronize energetically to the machine world and then stabilise permanently once the new political state was realised. As its production regimens drive toward 'lock off', cinema is a conservative form, like nationalism. Cinema and nationalism; each serves a popular, paradoxical desire for the acknowledgement and the cessation of change. Indeed, this is one of the traits we love about cinema: it shows us the thrill of energetic convergence and world-creation at the same time as it proposes an eventual end to flux and uncertainty. With a film, the final edit is a stable state, a kingdom of kinetic excitement with a reassuring climate of completion.

Comparing the nexus of cinema and nationalism with the contemporary dyad of digital media and transnationalism (or globalisation), we can ask whether digital multimedia systems have arisen to reflect and impel our contemporary psychic and social conditions. Like cinema, digital multimedia can federate disparate elements (sound, texts, graphics, perspectives, vistas and audio-visual rhythms) into astonishing new configurations...But unlike cinema (and unlike nationalism), digital multimedia produces syntheses that are always explicitly provisions. (Yes, in this respect it is like transnationalism.) Because of the dynamics of its file structures and the integrating, evolving codes that get applied to those files, any digital multimedia configuration is a contentious event in a continuous process rather than a completed, content-full object; it is always ready to be dismantled and re-assembled into new alignments as soon as the constituent files have been federated in response to momentarily prevailing 'world conditions.'

In other words, because multimedia rarely gets 'locked-off', its component element can always be pulled apart, sent back to their databases and then instantaneously rearranged into newly iterated federations. (Yes, in this respect it is like our unstable contemporary lives, so buffeted with ever-altering values, opportunities, anxieties and obligations all upwelling because of globalisation, migration and multiculturalism.)...Taking some of their dynamics from the channel-switching montage-effects that radio and television have always afforded, digital multimedia systems can re-conform themselves restlessly in ways that a cinema print is not designed to do. Such systems can reflect and impel how we live now in relational engagement within a myriad influences that are dynamically networked in constantly evolving systems of communication and stored, searchable information."

--Ross Gibson, "The Rise of Digial Multimedia Systems" Cultural Studies Review, Volume 12, Number 1, March 2006, p. 144-145

May CommQuote

It was only a matter of time until I worked New York School poet Frank O'Hara into this blog. It's not even a stretch because his poems are full of references to the movies and feeling about the whole movie-going experience. Here's a rather famous one.

AVE MARIA

Mothers of America

let your kids go to the movies!

get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to

it's true that fresh air is good for the body

but what about the soul

that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images

and when you grow old as grow old you must

they won't hate you

they won't criticize you they won't know

they'll be in some glamorous country

they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you

for their first sexual experience

which only cost you a quarter

and didn't upset the peaceful home

they will know where candy bars come from

and gratuitous bags of popcorn

as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over

with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg

near the Williamsburg Bridge

oh mothers you will have made the little tykes

so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies

they won't know the difference

and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy

and they'll have been truly entertained either way

instead of hanging around the yard

or up in their room

hating you

prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet

except keeping them from the darker joys

it's unforgivable the latter

so don't blame me if you won't take this advice

and the family breaks up

and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set

seeing

movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young

[1960]

From Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O'Hara. City Lights Books. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Frank O'Hara.org.