A research network for European media historians since 2013
Tony Stoller, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Media History at Bournemouth University, gives insight into his post-doc research idea about the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on classical music radio.
No less than six of us EMHIS scholars were eager to attend the ECREA Communication History conference in Venice, Italy, on Sept 16–18th. The overall theme of the conference was ”Bridges and Boundaries” and the site was the Warwick University’s seat in Palazzo Pesaro Papafava. The organizers’ aim was to foster interdisciplinary dialogue around the history of communication, media, networks and technologies, to explore the bridges and boundaries between different fields of research, and to encourage the participants to exchange ideas about how communication history is being done, but also how it might be done in the future.
The innovative and non-traditional format of the conference was centered around very short 5-minute presentations focusing on theories, concepts and sources, which left plenty of room for extended round table discussions. Especially interesting – but also challenging – was the ambition to find the bridge between the work of early modern scholars with research of the digital environment and the group of phenomena we call ”new media”.
At the conference, EMHIS was represented by Marie Cronqvist, Hugh Chignell, Maike Helmers, Johan Jarlbrink and Hans-Ulrich Wagner. The EMHIS presentation on Wednesday morning, under the panel ”Theories and Models”, was held by Hans-Ulrich, who developed his intervention around the three concepts of EMHIS: entanglement, media, and histories. We all had a wonderful stay in Venice, taking the gondola to work every morning, socializing with each other and with scholars from all over the world, meeting dear old and exciting new friends. And yes, the food and drinks were okay too…
On Saturday, as I lingered on in Venice in order to catch the latest possible flight back that day, I had the opportunity to visit the city archive. I joined a small group of scholars particularly interested in the very impressive digitization project they are working with there. The ambitious project, called the Venice Time Machine (read more about it here and in an inspiring TED talk by Frederic Kaplan in which he speaks about his idea to construct ”a Google Map or Facebook of the past”), is carried out by the Digital Humanities Laboratory at École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne in cooperation with the University Ca’Foscari of Venice. The magnificent aim is to build a multidimensional model of Venice covering more than 1000 years of city evolution by reconstructing a large open access database to be used for research and teaching – and they seem to be well on their way!
/Marie
Christoph Hilgert from Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and research fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg explains his PhD project about the BBC’s and West-German radios’ debates about young people as well as their programmes for young listeners between 1945 and 1963. Lately his work has been published with Wallstein and is now available for purchase.
Gloria Khamkar, PhD candidate at the Centre for Media History at Bournemouth University and a radio professional, describes her PhD research on the Evolution of Asian radio in England between 1960 and 2004.
Alina Laura Tiews, PhD candidate at Münster’s Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität and researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, concludes her PhD research on German refugees and expellees as represented in post-war cinema and TV of the divided Germany.
Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to publish a series of six video clips on this website, which feature individual and joint research projects by EMHIS members. Through these videos, we want to show the variety of themes, questions and approaches of studying media history with regard to forms of entanglement that are discussed by the EMHIS network.
The clips are part of an audiovisual experiment that has been initiated for EMHIS by Gloria Khamkar, PhD researcher at the Centre for Media History at Bournemouth University, Alina Tiews, PhD student and researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, and Christoph Hilgert, postdoctoral research fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg.
The idea is to present ongoing or recently accomplished research done by the EMHIS members not only in the traditional way of written articles, but also in an audiovisual form. We aim to produce forms of more elaborated videos or audiovisual essays in the future.
The forthcoming six videos were filmed at the Miramar Hotel during the EMHIS Forum IV in Bournemouth in May 2015. Gloria Khamkar and Roger Shufflebottom (Technical Tutor) at the Media School of Bournemouth University did the post-production.
Each scholar is talking on three main subjects in their respective video clip: the topic of the research project, the methodology, and the respective key findings.
Please forgive us possible shortcomings in the way the clips are arranged. We hope that you will have as much fun watching these video clips as we had shooting and producing them!
Gloria, Alina & Christoph
Kate Terkanian, who joined Bournemouth University’s Centre for Media History in September 2014, is pursuing a PhD project on Women, Wartime and the BBC. The project will explore women’s roles at the BBC during the Second World War. The project is designed to complement research conducted by Centre members Kate Murphy and Kristin Skoog, who have conducted research on the interwar years, and the post-war years, respectively.
While previous studies of the wartime BBC have focussed on the propaganda efforts aimed at women, there has been limited research into women behind the scenes at the BBC. Kate will explore how the rapidly growing BBC
utilized women staff across the organisation.
Kate has a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Master’s Degree in History from the University of Tulsa. Her master’s project examined the use of propaganda in constructing the ideal woman in the United States during World War II. She has also worked in the museum sector in the UK and in commercial and non-commercial television in the US.
The EMHIS-members Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Alina Laura Tiews speak about EMHIS in the latest issue of “BredowCast”, a podcast published by the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research in Hamburg. They explain the EMHIS approach towards entanglement and why this is important to integrate in today’s media historical work. By giving examples from their own case studies on repatriated German BBC-trainees after World War II as well as on the GDR filmmaker Egon Günther and his work in West Germany, Hans-Ulrich and Alina give an insight into actually ‘doing EMHIS’, too. The 30 minutes-interview is in German and can be listened to online here.
The U.K. members of EMHIS are also engaged in discussions about media archives and how those might be made more accessible. Hugh Chignell chairs a group called the “UK Radio Archives Advisory Committee” and on May 21st there was a meeting at the British Library to discuss a report on improving access to historic BBC archives.
The report “Academic requirements for pre-1989 BBC archive content” by Richard Hewett has been published in late 2014. Kate Terkanian and Katy Homden also attended the meeting and although nothing particular was decided it was agreed that there is a genuine need for better access to archives, and especially historic radio, and also that a lot of important material is already online if extremely difficult to find!
British sound archivists are very aware of European, and especially
Scandinavian, archive practice and Heidi Svømmekjær and Bente Larsen from Denmark have spoken previously about the LARM-project (mass digitisation of Danish radio) at the British Library.
Hugh
A workshop at the German Broadcasting Archive on flight and expulsion proves the necessity of an eye-to-eye cooperation between archivists and media historians.
Sooner or later every historical research comes down to a simple but crucial question: the archives. In the case of media history, this can lead to major diplomatic endeavours, as a media historian’s work very often relies on private archives from media enterprises, plus, audio or audio-visual material implies specific challenges in terms of accessibility or copyrights.
Thankfully, academic and political awareness for the importance of alliances between media historical archives and research has been growing a lot recently (see for example here, here or here). Still, every well-functioning cooperative very much depends on people actually knowing each other and working together (last but not least, best-practised by the EMHIS-network). Establishing these new bonds between broadcasting archivists and historians was the aim exactly of a workshop taking place at the German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) in Frankfurt am Main on June 18/19, 2015.
Together with our colleagues from Augsburg University, Prof. Maren Röger, and Oldenburg University, Dr. Stephan Scholz, EMHIS-member Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wagner and I organized the workshop. Centred on the historical topic of flight and expulsion of Germans in the end and aftermath of WWII, the workshop brought archivists from most of the German public service broadcasting stations and researchers from the areas of media history, memory studies and research on forced migration together. Archivists presented material from their broadcasting archives; researchers flanked these empirical findings with methodological advice and insights into the broader historical contexts.
Apart from Hans-Ulrich Wagner and myself two other EMHIS-members were on board in Frankfurt: Christoph Hilgert and Dr. Yvonne Robel. Prof. Inge Marszolek, who was a guest at the EMHIS-Forum III in Hamburg in November 2014, joined the workshop as well. For a start, Christoph Hilgert mapped the field: He gave an excellent overview over the very promising, yet scarcely researched area of German broadcasting programmes dealing with flight and expulsion after 1945 (see his handbook article on this topic as well).
Yvonne Robel presented an intriguing case-study based on her findings on the “Suchkind”-stories, a cross-medial phenomenon flourishing in West-Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s. Yvonne stated how these stories about a refugee mother and her lost child became iconic topoi of loss and homesickness, which are essential elements of many narratives of flight and expulsion, as Prof. Bill Niven from Nottingham Trent University happened to have claimed in his talk the day before.
Particularly sensational to many participants of the workshop, it seemed though, were the archivists’ presentations. Not only did they surprise the audience with their magnificent findings from their ‘treasure chambers’ at the broadcasting stations, they also managed to explain these in a very entertaining and, I dare to say, thrilling way. Bettina Hasselbring from Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) in fact spoke of a “Polit-Krimi” at BR, summarizing how attempts of functionaries from the expellees’ associations and parties to influence Bavarian broadcasting programmes in the 1950s resembled a political thriller. Also the presentations by Jana Behrendt and Tobias Fasora (both SWR), Petra Witting-Nöthen (WDR) and Dr. Jörg-Uwe Fischer (DRA Potsdam) really stood out and gave a whole new dimension to the workshop’s programme.
Hence, apart from the great progress researchers could make in learning more about a broadcasting history of flight and expulsion, this workshop really proved how important it is for historians to build true personal networks with archivists. We need to meet at eye-level and integrate their knowledge to our work, especially when new, bigger research projects are about to start, as it is so important to gain a reliable overview over the existing sources. Hopefully, this workshop can set an example.
Check out the following radio interviews and articles (here, here, here and here) for further information.
/Alina
EMHIS member Patrik Lundell will present on the upcoming ECREA Communication and Democracy Conference, “Political Agency in the Digital Age: Media, Participation and Democracy”, in October 2015, addressing entangled issues. The paper is presented with Kristoffer Holt at Linnæus University and is titled “Mistrusting the media – now and then”. Here is the abstract:
“Characteristic of many contemporary far right movements is a deeply rooted scepticism and suspiciousness towards mainstream media. During the PEGIDA marches in Dresden, Germany, ‘Lügenpresse’ is a common slogan. The message is that hegemonic mainstream media conceal or distort information that does not fit the ‘politically correct’ agenda. In Sweden far right movements, ranging from right wing populist parties such as the Sweden Democrats (SD) to more extreme identitarian think tanks such as motpol.nu exhibit the same attitude (Holt, 2015). Radical right media channels therefore need to be analysed in the light of its position as a perceived corrective of traditional media and constrained public discourse. But is this a new phenomenon? In this paper we compare findings from two separate studies of radical right wing media criticism from different periods: the online contemporary identitarian wictionary Metapedia.org (Holt & Rinaldo, 2014) and the media criticism in the journal Sweden-Germany (1938 to 58) published by the pro-German National Society Sweden-Germany (RST) (Lundell, 2015). Our aim is to study historical antecedents to today’s far right media criticism and discuss contemporary far right media criticism in the light of what can be learned from history.
Keywords: media criticism; Riksföreningen Sverige-Tyskland: metapolitics; metapedia.org; motpol.nu; Sverigedemokraterna
Literature
Holt, Kristoffer. (2015). “media.criticism@metapedia.org: Populism, metapolitics and online participation.” Paper presented at the New Perspectives on Populist Political
Communication COST Early Stage Researchers Think Tank. Zurich (26–30 January 2015), Zürich, Switzerland.
Holt, Kristoffer, & Rinaldo, Mikael. (2014). Exploring the dark side of participatory online media : Online participation, identitarian discourse and media criticism at Metapedia.org: Journalism in Transition: Crisis or opportunity?
Lundell, Patrik. (2015). “De välvilligas rationalitet: Objektivitetsideal och mediekritik inom Riksföreningen Sverige-Tyskland 1938 till 1958”, in Maria Björkman, Patrik Lundell & Sven Widmalm (eds.) De intellektuellas förräderi? Relationer mellan Sverige och Tredje riket inom vetenskap och kultur, Arkiv: Lund, forthcoming.
EMHIS was especially invited to present our network at one of the so-called “spotlight sessions” during the international ACSIS conference in Norrköping 15-17 of June. This year, the very nicely arranged conference in a sunny and warm mid-Sweden had the theme “In the flow – people, media, materialities”. It was the sixth biennial conference of ACSIS, which stands for Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden. A wide range of topics, dealing with both contemporary and past media, was covered in over 35 different panels and sessions. The themes under specific discussion on the conference ranged from body monitoring to translation, touching on issues such as heritage, search cultures and remembering. Several sessions focus on tracking and measuring of flows in personal as well as social and commercial contexts.
As an introduction to our spotlight session, arranged as the grand finale of the conference on June 17, the EMHIS network and its activities was first presented by Marie Cronqvist and Johan Jarlbrink. This was followed by four short presentations of ongoing research projects. In the first of these, Hugh Chignell, Bournemouth, presented his work on the BBC radio drama, using the case of Samuel Beckett to highlight entangled dimensions both in terms of methodology and entangled objects. Kristin Skoog, Bournemouth, then outlined a coming research project on the BBC and the formation of the British welfare state in the reconstruction period, pointing to interesting transnational dimenisons – such as for example the constant references to “the Swedish model” – as well as a range of intermedial relations between print, radio, exhibitions, and propaganda literature. Kristin was followed by Marie Cronqvist, Lund, who presented her project on the entangled networks of television with regards to the relationship between Sweden and the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, Johan Jarlbrink, Umeå, presented his study on the entangled nature of diplomatic relations and the role of the media in the 1905 dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union. After the four presentations, a joint discussion with the audience took place.
In another session at the conference called “Disciplined records” (Disciplinerade handlingar), Charlie Järpvall presented his soon-to-be-finished PhD thesis on office paper as a communicative medium in the mid 20th century.
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