A research network for European media historians since 2013
The schedule for EMHIS Forum IV in Bournemouth later this month is now online. The theme for this forum is Convergence and Divergence of Media Forms.
As a specially invited guest on this event is Professor Tom O’Malley, Aberystwyth University, who will be giving a talk on publishing strategies.
See you in Bournemouth!
We are happy to announce that two of the latest articles in the academic journal Media History are written by EMHIS scholars Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Johan Jarlbrink. Wagner writes about the transfer of the BBC public service model to Northern Germany in the early postwar era, while Jarlbrink explores the small journalistic tools, norms and roles in terms of mobile and sedentary news work around 1900 and 2000. The articles could be accessed here:
EMHIS-member Dr Tony Stoller successfully defended his thesis at the end of April.
The thesis sets out the first comprehensive, longitudinal, narrative history of classical music broadcast on UK radio in the second half of the 20th century, relating that to the changing political, social and economic circumstances of those decades. Beginning before the launch of the BBC Third Programme, and continuing until after the launch of the commercial station Classic FM, it describes and analyses the wide range of services which offered this style of music, describing a far broader spectrum than previous discourse had identified.
These 50 years were characterised by a series of high points, when classical music services were broadcast across a number of different channels, offered highbrow and middlebrow content, provided links between elite and popular output, and were accessible to a broad range of potential listeners. Each of those then provoked a reaction from the self-appointed intellectual elite, concerned at the diminishing of what they regarded as ‘high art’ in the interest of mass appeal, and reflecting the class-based assumptions of British society during these years.
Across the period, the quantity of classical music broadcast increased from less than 20 hours a week in 1945 to nearly 240 hours a week by 1995, providing music by an increasing number of composers, but remaining centred in the classical music canonic repertoire arising initially from the First Viennese School of composers: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert. The potential audience remained surprisingly constant, at between 5 and 6 ½ million listeners, when services were offered which were accessible to a wider public.
Classical music radio was not the sole preserve of the BBC. There was significant output from the Independent Local Radio stations between 1975 and 1989, while a full scale classical music station funded by advertising – Classic FM – had a major impact, coincident with the recasting of BBC Radio 3 in the early nineties and beyond.
The pattern of classical music radio throws light also upon the place of culture in UK society, on the relationship between highbrow and popular culture in the UK, on the relevance of biography in writing media history and on the nature of public service radio broadcasting. But it is not just an academic signifier; it is primarily a compelling new story, adding to the understanding of broadcasting history in the UK, and of post-war British society as a whole.
Planning is almost complete now for EMHIS forum 4 at the Miramar hotel, Bournemouth May 26th to 29th on the themes of Convergence and Divergence and Media Materialities.
We are also hosting our guest speaker, Professor Tom O’Malley from the University of Aberystwyth talking about publication strategies.
We are calling Forum 4 ”boot camp” because the focus is on working and producing!
As we are meeting in Bournemouth at the end of May we are also all looking forward to some lovely sunny weather.
This will be the largest ever EMHIS forum and we will be welcoming a new member, Professor Kerstin Stutterheim who was recently appointed Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Bournemouth and is joining the Centre for Media History.
Hugh
Professor Christina von Hodenbergs keynote “Measuring television’s social impact” from EMHIS 3 in Hamburg last November was caught on tape:
A delegation of Media History researchers from Bournemouth University recently visited the University of Lund in Sweden from Monday 2nd to 6th March. The aim of this visit was to engage in the study sessions related to individual research projects, as well as participating in a one-day workshop on ‘Media History – Interpreting Sources’. It was a really invigorating experience for all of us, especially when we discussed our on-going research projects, the common experiences while accomplishing our goals, and on top of it, the revelations about our own strengths and weaknesses!
The workshop on ‘Media History – Interpreting Sources’ on Thursday the 5th was really useful. We were joined by the research colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, and of course the colleagues from the host Media History Department of University of Lund. We all discussed the challenges and limitations in accessing archive material in our research projects. There were few common issues shared by the colleagues, such as accessibility, availability, cataloguing, and photo/copying archive material. In the afternoon, we had a group activity to discuss this further by using couple of examples of archive material.
Apart from the study sessions and workshop, we greatly enjoyed exploring the lovely city of Lund; especially going to the local pubs and restaurants, and of course shopping! Some of us roamed around the city centre; we went to the cathedral, did some window-shopping in classy shoe-shops, explored few streets to locate a ‘patisserie’ to buy yummy cinnamon rolls, and yes of course, the second-hand shops! We were so impressed by the quality and pricing of the furniture, that we wanted to buy some for our homes in the UK, but didn’t think it would fit in the tiny cabins of Easyjet, so we gave up, instead bought some nice crockery and jewellery!
Overall, it was an unforgettable trip to Lund. We really missed our lovely colleagues from Hamburg!! Eagerly looking forward to see you all in Bournemouth in May!!
Gloria
Charlotte Nilsson, since the beginning of January PhD-student in Lund, is the newest member of our EMHIS-network.
Inspired by the wide notion of media, she studies trade and consumption from a media (systems) perspective. More specifically, she explores mail-order retailing in the early 20th century as a meaning-making medium. Her intent is to focus on the systems for distribution and marketing, as well as the materiality of the medium and the practices surrounding it.
Charlotte has a Bachelor degree in Ethnology and a Master’s degree in Strategic Communication, and aims to integrate the two within the discipline of Media History. Before starting her PhD studies, she has worked several years with internationalization of education, as well as with research communication. She also has experience from the museum sector.
Welcome Charlotte!
Here is Benedict von Bremen’s report on the conference “Media and the Cold War, 1975–1991” held at Volda University College in Norway, Nov 20-21, 2014. EMHIS was represented by Marie Cronqvist.
The Annual Conference of the German Communication Association?s Communication History Division in 2015 took place in Hamburg 15-17 January under the theme “Neue Vielfalt” (“New Variety”) It was hosted by the newly renamed EMHIS partner institution “The Centre for Media History”, headed by Hans-Ulrich Wagner, at the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research and the University of Hamburg. 30 years after the establishment of commercial broadcasting in the Federal Republic of Germany, the conference dealt with diverse aspects of media pluralism and media competition in historical perspective. Therefore, twelve papers, presenting thoughts and results of current research projects, and two sessions with former media professionals, witnessing the early time of commercial radio and television in West Germany, explored the dimensions of variety with respect to media institutions, media professionals, media ensembles, and media content throughout the 20th century.
The doyen of communication history studies in Germany, Jürgen Wilke (emeritus professor of the University of Mainz), forinstance differentiated five key forces in or “determinants” of the process of media pluralisation in his initial keynote: technological, economical, professional (i.e. journalistic), societal, and political/legal developments. Usually, a combination of these – structural – determinants may be identified as driving forces of different states of plurality in media, Wilke said. Other presentations explored the role of specific actors, like journalists or politicians, and of cross-medial competition and their respective effects on the variety of media content or discussed the changing patterns of media usage.
I contributed to this with a talk about allegedly “illegitimate” competitors and impulses in West German radio history referring to the impact of foreign broadcasters on public-service radio programmes during the 1950s and 1960s. In general, phenomena from around 1900 to nowadays were of interest at the conference. Most papers focused on the German media system; in some case studies, however, the benefits of adding cross-border interrelations or trans-national as well as trans-medial dimensions – i.e. more or less the EMHIS approach – to the picture of “variety” and pluralisation in mass media history were discussed, too. It was assumed to be promising to widen the focus of research in this sense from time to time. Thus, it was a thought provoking meeting altogether. And moreover, as already mentioned here, during this conference I had the great honor of being presented the Young Scholar Award in Communication History 2015 by the German Communication Association.
// Christoph
Andreas Fickers — Professor of Contemporary and Digital History at Luxembourg University — who was a guest at EMHIS Forum 3 in Bournemouth in May is visiting The Film and Media history seminar next week.
From the abstract:
History as a field of enquiry is standing on the edge of a conceptual precipice. According to the British historian Toni Weller, historians need to be thinking about the radical impact of the digital turn in historiography and historical methodology in a critical and engaged manner. Yet the historical community remains surprisingly – or alarmingly –
silent when it comes to a critical reflection on the epistemological challenges of the digital turn. This lecture aims at addressing some of the key questions at stake and reflecting on how the digital affects the practice of doing history. Using the concept of ”trading zone”, current processes of disciplinary and methodological boundary work will be discussed in order to offer some preliminary theses about the actual state of hybridity in digital history.
COMMENTATORS
Jutta Haider, Associate professor of Information studies
Thomas Kaiserfeld, Professor of History of ideas and sciences
MODERATOR
Marie Cronqvist, Associate professor of Media history
The Film and Media history seminar is arranged by Media history at KOM and Film studies at SOL, Lund University.
On Friday the 16th of January, Christoph Hilgert received an award, the “Nachwuchsförderpreis Kommunikationsgeschichte 2015”, from the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (DGPuK) for his dissertation “Die unerhörte Generation. Jugend im westdeutschen und britischen Hörfunk der 1950er und frühen 1960er Jahre”. The proud EMHIS crowd congratulates!
Between November 25th and 29th, 2014 the third forum of the “Entangled Media Histories”-network took place in Hamburg. Once again, after our initial workshop in late 2013, we had the great pleasure to meet in the premises of the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research near the Campus of Hamburg University. The main focus of the workshop was on transnational audiences and media consumption as rather tricky, but core aspects of studying media history. Thus, we continued the fundamental discussions on how to get hold on entangled media histories, which began during our earlier meetings in Hamburg (Forum I) as well as in Bournemouth (Forum II) and which dealt with theories, methodological approaches and primary sources for the study of entanglement as an innovative and unique perspective on media history.
On Tuesday morning, EMHIS’ PhD-students held a Pre-Meeting chaired by Alina Tiews in order to present the current state of some PhD projects and to discuss methodological questions. Furthermore, Katy Homden and Kate Terkanian from Bournemouth’s Centre for Media History (CMH) were warmly welcomed as new PhD-candidates in the network. Afterwards the group visited Hamburg’s well-known “Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe” (Museum of Arts and Crafts) in order to explore entangled media histories in exhibits. A great deal of attention, for instance, was attracted by a reconstruction of 1969s quite colourful and rather psychedelic designed staff canteen of the former and meanwhile demolished office building of Germany’s leading news magazine “Der Spiegel”.
The third EMHIS Forum, then, was officially opened in the afternoon by an inspiring and thought-provoking keynote by our special guest Christina von Hodenberg, Professor of European History at the Queen Mary University of London and currently for one year Humboldt Research Award-Fellow at the Martin-Luther-Universität of Halle-Wittenberg. In her paper “Measuring television’s social impact: Transitional audiences in the era of limited choice” she explored the possibilities of studying television audiences and the societal impact of media during the late 1960s and 1970s. Based on a comparison of three television serials that relied on the same family sitcom format – “Till Death Us Do Part” in the United Kingdom, “All in the Family” in the United States of America, and “Ein Herz und eine Seele” (aka “Ekel Alfred”) in West Germany – Professor von Hodenberg explicated that television, as a catalyst, served to accelerate value changes in the respective society. Doing this, she gave an early insight in her new book, which will be published with BerghahnBooks in 2015. As further guests Professor Inge Marszolek and Yvonne Robel from the research network Communicative Figurations, which is linked to the Hans-Bredow-Institute, participated in the forum and gave exciting impulse for the ongoing debates.
Wednesday morning started with a presentation by Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Christoph Hilgert giving an overview of the existing approaches, theories, questions and methodological role models in the field of transnational audience and media consumption studies in media history. This helped to spark and to structure the following discussion, which engrossed our thoughts about both the benefits and the challenges of tracing the patterns – or even more daring the possible impact – of media reception in the past. No doubt, this is a rather demanding and laborious dimension of tracing entangled media histories. However, it is also a very important and instructive part for the understanding of mass media communication history and of history in general.
In the afternoon the EMHIS-members enjoyed the exclusive honour of being welcomed by Cathrine Stockinger, the head of the readers’ information service of Germany’s most important weekly news magazine “Der Spiegel”, in its ultra-modern, new office building in Hamburg’s HafenCity area. Beforehand, Philipp Seuferling had given a brief summary of the magazine’s outstanding history in the field of investigative journalism. Stockinger and her colleague Christian Goedecke from the Media Marketing Department introduced EMHIS to the current efforts in studying the “reader”, i.e. in tracing the unstable habits and interests of today’s media user. The structural changes in the media business in times of digitization and media convergence cause considerable uncertainties for the way of making and selling primarily text-based journalism (it is just random, of course, that the chief editor was asked to quit his job following disputes over the adequate strategy to cope with this scenario, just one week after our visit). It was a privilege, therefore, to get some insights in the crossmedial activities of “Der Spiegel” and the challenges of media market research. Unfortunately, future historians won’t be able to use most of the rich audience data collected here, which would be a great source in order to re-analyse today’s structural changes, because the data – albeit anonymous – are doomed to be deleted at regular intervals due to legal reasons.
After leaving “Der Spiegel’s” headquarters EMHIS gathered nearby in the famous “Kaffeerösterei”-Café to have some tasty coffee, hot chocolate, and cake for a well deserved refreshment. The idea of discussing several upcoming tasks in smaller project groups in this relaxed atmosphere turned out to be a little bit anarchic, but still was very productive. Plans were made, for instance, concerning joint conference appearances, publications, and for the exchange of ideas in the field of teaching entangled media histories.
Thursday morning was reserved for discussions on project presentations by our guest Yvonne Robel as well as by CMH’s new PhD-students Katy Homden and Kate Terkanian: Yvonne gave a talk about media discourses and urban identity in divided Germany of the 1950s, Katy outlined her project on the ambivalent relationship between opera in radio in Weimar Germany, and Kate gave an overview of her thesis dealing with the role of female broadcasters at the BBC during World War II. All these projects were appreciated by the EMHIS-group as very exciting endeavours that, not the less, will help to study various dimensions of entanglement in media history.
Afterwards plans were made for the next steps of the EMHIS publication ambitions. Besides the “normal”, i.e. printed, research output, it was discussed how to develop some new presentation forms as well. Alina Tiews, for instance, explained the idea of an audiovisual essay, which was appreciated to be a very interesting multimedia format. Later on there was a reception at the Institut für Medien und Kommunikation (Institute for Media and Communications) of Hamburg University. EMHIS, thus, got to know more media studies scholars based in Hamburg and made lots of new friends.
Then, Friday morning it was already time to say goodbye again. EMHIS Forum IV will take place in Bournemouth in May 2015. There we are in particular going to focus on forms of transmedial entanglement in our discussions.
/Christoph
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