[ecrea] Cfp2: Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and Cultural Memory

Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and Cultural Memory

Conference, The University of Copenhagen, November 14-15, 2013

www.larm-archive.org/conference


Keynote speakers:

David Hendy, University of Sussex

Karin Bijsterveld, Maastricht University

Lev Manovich, City University of New York

Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin-Madison



We welcome abstracts for our open paper sessions and for panels taking 
place at the conference. Sub-calls for the panels can be found by 
following the links bellow.


Digitization enables us to meet cultural heritage artifacts and 
narratives in heretofore unimagined media and platforms. Accessibility 
to written, visual, auditory and audiovisual sources increase 
dramatically. But how do we wish to access and interact with cultural 
heritage sources in the 21st Century? This conference focuses on 
practices of cultural memory in the multiform meetings between users and 
cultural heritage. What interfaces are established between users, be 
they researchers or ‘ordinary’ citizens, and the archives of cultural 
heritage? What possibilities are opened for interaction with cultural 
heritage artifacts? And what methods and scientific paradigms are 
relevant to order and describe such immense archives.

One aspect, which seems still to have received too little treatment is 
the question of the auditory and audiovisually based cultural heritage’s 
role in the construction of historical narratives. Music, film, radio, 
and television have become ingrained in a nation’s cultural memory, and 
in many, not least, European countries, state-governed national 
broadcasting corporations have played and do still play a vital role in 
narrating and interpreting the past, not least by establishing 
institutional production archives which give producers access to 
historical material otherwise inaccessible. Such reuses of historical 
materials afford renegotiations of the historical past(s) by valuating 
the new historical materials as significant historical sources. 
Digitization means that such historical materials, be they broadcast or 
other cultural heritage artifacts, are to an increasing degree 
accessible outside the production environment, e.g. for research. One 
recurring problem is that the materials are still under the editorial 
control of the parent institution and accessible only for some uses to 
some users. This motivates a new look at the question of who has the 
right to circulate archived material in what forms, and thus who is 
allowed to narrate the past. The question is relevant at all levels, 
from the level of national cultural politics all the way down to the 
concrete definition of rights for individual users in the archive or on 
broadcaster’s websites.

The conference wishes to contribute new perspectives on the first by 
focusing on (access to) digital media archives, a phenomenon that has 
only really come into existence within the last decades; Secondly, by 
focusing on auditory and audiovisual source material, i.e. data sources 
with an extension in time, as oppose to texts and pictures. Again, 
digital archives of auditory and audiovisual material are rather young 
compared to archives of (scanned) texts and pictures. Finally, the 
conference’s focus is on the digital archives’ role in the construction 
of a cultural history as well as studies in cultural history and 
cultural memory. Traditionally, digital humanities have tended to focus 
on the internal structure of artifacts, e.g. using digital texts to 
investigate language systems, translations, stylistics etc.

The conference welcomes contributions from a broad range of researchers, 
designers and developers who work with digital archives of auditory and 
audiovisual media in the investigation or production of cultural history 
phenomena. All of these definitions shall be taken in their widest 
sense. A digital archive can range from enormous national archives to 
the archives collected by individual researchers and research groups. 
Similarly, the conference wishes to invited both concrete experience 
with collecting and using a digital archives as well as theoretical 
reflections on the nature of the digital archive. Likewise, the concepts 
of cultural history and cultural memory shall be taken in their broadest 
sense and can include both historical investigations and research within 
the broader humanities with either an historical or an aesthetic scope.

Papers

We welcome papers relating to the general outline of the above call. The 
conference will embrace three sub themes:  Interface (i.e. the 
construction, design and interface of the archive), Immensity (dealing 
with the vast amounts of data which all of a sudden are available to 
research that has heretofore tended to work qualitatively with rather 
small samples), Memory (choosing from the archives, sampling and 
building a coherent interpretation). Please indicate if your paper 
addresses one or two of the themes in particular.

Panels

Along with open and themed paper sessions, we have accepted a number of 
themed panels to take place at the conference.  A themed panel will 
consist of a minimum of 3 papers with a common research question. If you 
whish your paper to be taken under consideration for a particular panel, 
please select the panel as "category" in the Easy Chair submission form. 
Submissions not accepted for panels will be taken into consideration for 
the open paper sessions.

    ·      The practices of exhibiting sound, organized by Christian 
Hviid Mortensen & Morten Søndergaard

    ·      Infrastructural Sustainability and Curatorial Practices of 
the Digital Archive, organized by Luca Antoniazzi

    ·      How to make radio and sound archives work for audiences? 
Organized by Zillah Watson?

    ·      Who keeps the memory? Organized by Teo Mäusli, Brecht 
Declercq & Petra van Dijk

    ·      Challenging the homogeneity of ’media language’, organized 
by Jacob Thøgersen

    ·      My Childhood Radios, organized by Henrik Reeh?

    ·      Transnational Radio Encounters, organized by Golo Föllmer & 
Jacob Kreutzfeldt

    ·      Radio and Music/Music Radio, organized by Morten Michelsen



Submissions

Deadline for paper abstracts (max 200 words) 1 June 2013?Notification on 
acceptance will be given by the beginning of July 2013

Please send submissions via EasyChair: 
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=larm2013. Please 
forward the automatically generated submission confirmation to: 
(conference /at/ larm-archive.org).

We strongly encourage presentations of practice based and artistic projects.

Conference fee: 60 € (reduced price for students)



Affiliation

Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and Cultural Memory is arranged by 
LARM Audio Research Archive. LARM is an interdisciplinary project, the 
goal of which is the production of a digital infrastructure to 
facilitate researchers’ access to the Danish radiophonic cultural heritage.

The LARM project is a collaboration between a number of research and 
cultural institutions: The University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, 
Roskilde University, The University of Southern Denmark, Aalborg 
University, The Royal School of Library and Information Science, The 
Danish Broadcasting Corporation, The State and University Library, 
Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation, Kolding School of Design and The 
Museum of Media.

The main purpose of LARM is to establish a digital archive with the 
appropriate tools and a bibliography to enable researchers to search and 
describe the many recordings of the radiophonic cultural heritage. Radio 
has played an important role in Danish lives and, today, radio 
broadcasts form an invaluable, yet untapped, source to Danish culture 
and history. LARM Audio Research Archive will allow access to thousands 
of hours of national and local radio broadcasts from 1925 and onwards 
and thus prepare them for future research.

LARM – Audio Research Archive: http://www.larm-archive.org/



Organisation

Organizers: Jacob Thøgersen, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Morten Michelsen, Per 
Jauert, Frederik Tygstrup & Bente Larsen

Scientific committee: Morten Søndergaard, Erik Granly, Ditte Laursen, 
Marianne Lykke, Birger Larsen, Erik Svendsen

Contact: for questions and enquiries please contact Jacob Kreutzfeldt 
((jacobk /at/ hum.ku.dk)) or Jacob Thøgersen ((jthoegersen /at/ hum.ku.dk))

Please consult the conferences website at: www.larm-archive.org/conference

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