• DARIAH EU
• 0508 media and communications close

This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ (M&M) – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

Dans le cadre du programme de recherche Numerev, dont la finalité pratique vise à offrir aux communautés de chercheurs un portail de ressources numériques en libre accès ainsi qu’un outil de gestion des connaissances, nous avons rapidement été confrontés à des problématiques liées à des incompréhensions disciplinaires, tant du point de vue du vocable employé que des pratiques info-communicationnelles utilisées. Ce faisant, il nous est apparu opportun de mobiliser les chercheurs œuvrant dans des projets interdisciplinaires afin de mettre en commun, comparer et débattre des projets, méthodologies et expérimentations déployées dans cette visée.