When linear television enters the archive, its temporal context tends to become obscured. Based on Dutch TV news, we propose three easy-to-use methods for recapturing this context: visualizing repetitive imagery through screenshots; colour coding the relationship between archived broadcasts and broadcast schedules as printed in newspapers; and colour-coding segments in archival speech transcripts. Together, these methods show how archived television can be understood as the epitome of a 'recombinatory practice' (Uricchio, 2011), mixing flow, segmentation, and repetition with archival reordering, while also emphasizing the need for broader access to that same temporal context.

Metadata do not merely give explicit information about records in the archive but can also be considered a source of information about the (historical) context in which they are created. This chapter combines the insights of critical data studies and archival studies to formulate a hands-on approach to tracing metadata in archival search systems. The approach, which builds further on Loukissas’s local reading strategies, consists of two distinct phases: an exploration phase to trace and select and an analysis phase to trace and compare. The author concludes that a lot of data necessary to understanding metadata in search systems is hidden—different forms of what can be considered “interstitial data.”

This article examines how the ‘refugee crisis’, sparked by the arrival of refugees from the Syrian civil war and other conflicts around the world, was articulated across Dutch television news programs and social media between 2013 and 2018. This crisis has been described as a key catalyst of the radicalization of European political discourse. Crucially, it took shape during a period of profound transformation of the media landscape, in which mass media lost significant ground to social media as authoritative sources of truth and norms. The research focuses on the crucial but underexplored link between television and social media discourse, which is at the heart of contemporary European public debate. Using a combination of digital methods and NLP techniques, the article compares automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts of Dutch televised news on the refugee crisis with responses from publics on Facebook and Twitter. This computational cross-media approach enables a longitudinal analysis of how social media users differ in their interpretation of key events characterizing the crisis, as well as what language is acceptable to debate issues around integration, tolerance and identity. A rejection of mainstream news media editorial guidelines by social media users eventually resulted in their consumption of populist right-wing (‘alternative’) news media and active transgression of anti-discriminatory speech norms.

While television has never been fully obtained by national borders, the archives that preserve its heritage have long been positioned within nation-centred frameworks. Through wide-scale digitisation, combined with the internationalisation of our societies, more international users are finding their way to these archives, resulting in a transnational (re)circulation of the collections. This article therefore sets out to understand how transnational flows are visible and findable by tracing a clip of Laika the Soviet dog within three digital television archives: EUscreen, the Internet Archive and the CLARIAH Media Suite. It is shown that television archives should paradoxically emphasise the national borders in their collections in order to facilitate transnational television research. While national demarcations may be debated, defining them clearly will guide researchers between and over them.

In this contribution we introduce a compilation of articles that reflect on the use of the CLARIAH Media Suite and its impact on research methods, as they were conducted during the CLARIAH research pilot projects (2017-18). The pilot projects fit in a co-development approach in which users are involved in infrastructure development from the start. We discuss how feedback of the pilot researchers was incorporated in the iterative development and testing of the Media Suite.

Our special issue explores audio and visual (AV) data as form, method, and practice in the digital humanities. Spurred by recent advances in computing alongside disciplinary expansions of what counts as evidence, audio and visual ways of knowing are enjoying a more prominent place in the field. Whether the creation, analysis, and sharing of audiovisual data or audiovisual ways of communicating scholarly knowledge, scholars are building compelling avenues of inquiry that are changing how we know, what we know, and why we know in the digital humanities (DH). These epistemological shifts not only challenge existing methodological and theoretical pathways within the field of audiovisual studies, but most importantly defy existing knowledge hierarchies within the entire field of DH.

In the past decade, an increasing set of digital tools has been developed with which digital sources can be selected, analyzed, and presented. Many tools go beyond key word search and perform different types of analysis, aggregation, mapping, and linking of data selections, which transforms materials and creates new perspectives, thereby changing the way scholars interact with and perceive their materials. These tools, together with the massive amount of digital and digitized data available for humanities research, put a strain on traditional humanities research methods. Currently, there is no established method of assessing the role of digital tools in the research trajectory of humanities scholars. There is no consensus on what questions researchers should ask themselves to evaluate digital sources beyond those of traditional analogue source criticism. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of digital tools and the discussion of how to evaluate and incorporate them in research, based on findings from a digital tool criticism workshop held at the 2017 Digital Humanities Benelux conference. The overall goal of this article is to provide insight in the actual use and practice of digital tool criticism, offer a ready-made format for a workshop on digital tool criticism, give insight in aspects that play a role in digital tool criticism, propose an elaborate model for digital tool criticism that can be used as common ground for further conversations in the field, and finally, provide recommendations for future workshops, researchers, data custodians, and tool builders.

This article sheds an empirical light on interdisciplinary collaboration within the Digital Humanities by investigating the daily research practice of the Dutch Digital Humanities-project BRIDGE. The project developed and tested methods for automatically creating meaningful links and expanding archival television data. In the project, a high level of collaboration was required between scholars from two different disciplines: computer sciences and media studies. The majority of the epistemological encounters between the two disciplines took place in the design of the developed tools and the user studies to test the tools. The article is based on structured conversations between the two central staff members in the project, i.e. the computer science PhD-student and the media studies postdoctoral researcher. By unravelling the research project as a process of confrontation, identification and acknowledgement of situated knowledges, the article shows when and how the boundaries between the two disciplines have been maintained, crossed and blurred. The authors point to the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration in the Digital Humanities, and formulate some best practices for future Digital Humanities-projects.

Big-scale infrastructure projects in the humanities and social sciences such as the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) (Edmond et al., 2017), or the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) (Hinrichs and Krauwer, 2014) aim to provide solutions for both preservation and access to collections and data necessary for scholarly research (Zundert, 2012). Some infrastructure projects build decentralized “atomic” software services, e.g., as in the LLS infrastructure project (Buchler et al., 2016), while others prefer to build more centralized virtual research environments, as in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) (Lauer, 2014). Also, even within a single infrastructure project, these two models can coexist. This is the case of the CLARIAH infrastructure, where different approaches have been taken to date for serving different user groups, i.e., several specialized tools for linguists (Odijk, Broeder & Barbiers, 2015), or a research environment (the Media Suite) that serves the scholarly needs for working with audiovisual data collections and related mixed-media contextual sources that are maintained at cultural heritage and knowledge institutions. This paper discusses the rationale and challenges behind the development of the Media Suite.

This paper discusses the rationale behind and approach towards the development of a research environment –the Media Suite– in a sustainable, dynamic, multi-institutional infrastructure that supports mixed media scholarly research with large audiovisual data collections and available multimedia context collections, serving media scholars and digital humanists in general.

This article discusses the pedagogy and outcome of a new assignment we introduced in the course ‘Television History Online’ at Utrecht University. We assigned the students the task to build a canon of a genre of Dutch television and create a video poster on the EUscreen portal consisting of clips that represent part of their canon. In our pedagogy, we argue that it is important to draw students’ attention to what is missing in the archive. Therefore, we offered the students the possibility to replace illegal clips with blue videos and clips of non-digital or lost television programmes with black videos in their video poster. We found evidence for an availability paradox: students let not only their selection of programmes and clips, but also the demarcation of their entire canon, be reliant on the digital, online availability of audiovisual material. At the same time, they explicitly did not want to be restricted by unavailability. In this article we stress the need for more open data and the importance of training digital literacy skills.

In this paper, we propose a methodological operationalization of “public debates” as we focus on the research process of CLARIAH research pilot Debate Research Across Media (DReAM). In this pilot, heterogeneous datasets (of digitized print and audiovisual media) were made search-able with tools of the CLARIAH Media Suite, using the leveled research approach that we coined previously (combining distant and close reading) to do historical public debate analysis. The qualitative research interest in public debates on drugs and regulation is historical, but in order to bridge the gap between distant and close reading of the combined digital datasets, a number of insights from media studies is taken into consideration. The natures of the different media, the type of analysis and focus on the source material itself, and the necessity to combine historical expertise with a sensibility towards discursive relations are all considered before we argue that the accommodation of this approach in the Media Suite helps the researcher to gain an improved understanding of historical public debates in mass media.

It is our great pleasure to present this special issue of VIEW Journal of European Television and Culture in honour of Sonja de Leeuw, one of the founding members of the journal. The issue brings together articles that honour Sonja’s inspiring contributions to television history and television historiography.

The article discusses the results of the research project “Data-Driven Film History: A Demonstrator of EYE's Jean Desmet Collection” (2014–15). With a team of media scholars, archivists, and software developers, we conducted data-driven research to explore the affordances and pitfalls of digital methods for mining the resources of film archives and researching (early) cinema history. Working with the collection of cinema owner and distributor Jean Desmet, preserved at the EYE Filmmuseum, we used digital tools for the specific purpose of visualizing distribution networks and color patterns in film programs in the Netherlands during silent cinema's transitional years. The article discusses the lessons we learned from the project, both as scholars and as archivists. It opens with a brief introduction to the Desmet Collection and then considers our motivations, on one hand, for exploring digital research methods and, on the other, for choosing a particular set of tools. Subsequently, it discusses the mapping tool we developed as part of the project, reflecting in particular on the metadata issues it raised. In the final part of the article, we recount our experience of experimenting with tools for color analysis, paying particular attention to how the color patterns they generate might ultimately be combined with a data mapping and what sort of research possibilities this might in turn open up. The article demonstrates, among other things, how crucial it is for researchers to understand the provenance, affordances, and limitations of the data at their disposal and to make the discrepancies between them visible and transparent for others–including archivists.