American Black Journal

Detroit Public Television (DPTV) together with Michigan State University (MSU) have collaborated to catalog, preserve, and provide internet public access to the entire corpus of shows from the DPT television series, American Black Journal, that aired from 1968-2002.

Both DPTV and MSU shared in the two main goals of this project--digital preservation of the ABJ tapes and using the shows to create a significant, accessible multimedia archive of African-American history. The programs cover a broad spectrum of African American history:

1. Education and Families: Building Opportunity and Community
2. Leadership: Politics, Politicians, and Reform
3. Musical Roots: Jazz, Motown, Gospel, Hip Hop, & Techno
4. Literature and Language: The Richness and Diversity of Black Voices
5. Religion and Spiritual Life
6. Sports and Entertainment: Actors, Athletes and the Black Community
7. Africa and African-Americans
8. Urban Challenges: Development, Re-development, CommunityLife
9. Poverty, Progress, Rise of BlackBusinesses and Professionals
10. Motor City & Motown: Detroit in Regional and National Context

You can search the site by these themes as well as chronologically by decade; the programs themselves are a mere click or two away as you navigate this simple, handsomely designed site.

Factiva now includes multimedia

You now have another option in addition to the Vanderbilt News Archive and AP Photo Archive for your audiovisual research needs: Factiva, goldmine of newspapers and business/media industry publications, has gone multimedia. Click on the Search 2.0 interface and perform any search and you'll see that the results screen now includes a multimedia link (in addition to pictures, web news and the regular newspapers, magazines, and newswire links). The extent of Factiva's video holdings is not entirely clear but the emphasis is, of course, on business and finance. From the "What's new" section of the the site:

"The new fully searchable audio and video content collection is oriented to news and business information, rather than user-generated content, and allows you to view relevant results via the Multimedia results tab. It includes: continuously updating content collection that will grow quickly to include more than 4,000 multimedia news and business sources and more than 300,000+ individual episodes, charts and graphs and a 90-day archive from leading publishers such as Dow Jones, NPR and the BBC."

The "90-day archive" signals a rather significant historical limitation. Something to keep in mind. Tooling around I found audio and video from Sunday news shows, the major US networks, Slate, YouTube, and sports talk radio. This is great but a little frustrating because there's no multimedia source list in sight which is what I'd really like to see.

The search engine uses speech-to-text technology to make it possible to search the text of programs. It neatly highlights your search terms and allows you to jump to that place in the program.

As for pictures, if you don't want to be limited to the Associated Press (AP Photo Archive) you can turn to Factiva which includes newswire photos from Reuters, McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) and other international newswires.

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

Spotlight on a pioneering e-journal: Vectors

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television, describes itself as mapping "the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. As such, the journal speaks both implicitly and explicitly to key debates across varied disciplines, including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access. Operating at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, the journal focuses on the myriad ways technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations, both in the past and in the present." The Journal is edited by an international board and features both submissions and specially-commissioned works "comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and much more. Vectors doesn't seek to replace text; instead, [they] encourage a fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Simply put, [they] publish only works that need, for whatever reason, to exist in multimedia."

Volume I's two issues (2006) dealt with the themes of Evidence and Mobility, respectively. Volume II's issues intriguingly pursue Ephemera and Perception (current issue). Check out the site's Archive for the back issues.