[Commlist] CfP “Historical Traces of European Radio Archives, 1930-1960” workshop

Carolyn Birdsall is very pleased to invite applications for their first 
TRACE workshop “Historical Traces of European Radio Archives, 1930-1960".

As you can read in the CfP below, there’s scope for participants to 
investigate cases ‘beyond Europe’, and we welcome contributions from 
researchers and practitioners working on archival radio collections, in 
view of media history, critical archival studies, radio/sound studies, 
DH/digital history etc.

You will also find a digital version here 
<https://omekas.humanities.uva.nl/s/trace/page/events> and a Twitter 
announcement here <https://twitter.com/archivalradio>.

T
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**Call for Papers:
**
Historical Traces of European Radio Archives, 1930-1960
*
Dates: 28-29 October 2021
Location: University of Amsterdam and/or online
Organisers: Carolyn Birdsall, Corinna R. Kaiser and Erica Harrison
Contact: (trace /at/ uva.nl)
Abstracts: 15 April 2021, no more than 300 words plus short biography
Acceptance: 01 May 2021
Papers: 01 September 2021, position papers (2000-4500 words)

Bringing critical perspectives to bear on radio archives is the main 
departure point for this international workshop, which explores 
broadcasting, archives and the historical data they have 
co-produced. This two-day workshop brings together interdisciplinary 
perspectives from scholars and practitioners invested in 
theoretically-informed, connective histories about radio archives. It 
takes up a historical-geographical focus on radio archival collections 
in Europe that were affected by war and political transformations 
between 1930 and 1960, including case studies for Axis, as well as 
Allied, countries during and after World War II.

The task of critically analysing the radio archive may involve 
researching the holdings of a single institution. In the case of 
European radio archives, however, the scholar is often required to 
“re-collect” dispersed materials as a result of changed institutional 
circumstances (Badenoch 2018) or the aftermath of conflict, war or 
regime change (Birdsall 2018). One strategy for scrutinising such 
dispersed collections is to elucidate archivist practices in describing 
and cataloguing radio collections, and reveal “tacit narratives” 
indicative of past ideologies or political investments in the archive 
(Ketelaar 2002). Another productive approach may evaluate past choices 
of particular archival tools or technologies in order to record, copy, 
store, or preserve radio recordings.

The workshop builds on the growing attention to the significance of 
archival processes for the scholarly understanding of radio history. 
Against a long-held tendency to decry the ‘absence’ of sound recordings 
in the archive, there is a burgeoning interest in the rich potential of 
the radio archive as an object of study (Dolan 2003, Street 2014) and in 
constructing “new histories” (VanCour 2016). Recent data-driven 
approaches to the radio archive have also explored possibilities for 
‘big data’ analyses of digitized sources (Hughes et al. 2015, Goodmann 
et al. 2019), and speech recognition for the purposes of scholarly 
research (Ordelman and van Hessen 2018).

In response, this workshop focuses on connections between radio 
broadcasting, archival collections, and European history, thereby 
seeking to intervene in the fields of media history and sound studies 
that have rarely treated this interrelation. Thus, we ask:

  * How were archival collections established in radio broadcasting from
    around 1930 onwards?
  * In what ways were particular historical processes (e.g. war,
    conflict, regime change) significant in the life cycles of radio
    archival materials?
  * How have particular actors (e.g. archivists) or institutional
    frameworks impacted radio archival collections?
  * In what ways can the study of radio archival collections benefit
    from drawing on recent approaches developed in fields such as sound
    studies, digital history or computer science?


With the workshop, we seek to facilitate a conversation with specialists 
concerned with the complex histories of radio archival collections and 
the methodological possibilities for studying them today. The workshop 
sessions will revolve around panels with short presentations/discussions 
of ‘position papers’ (pre-circulated prior to the workshop).

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  * Media history approaches to the radio archive (e.g.
    transnational/entangled media history)
  * Impact of war, conflict or political change on radio archival
    collections
  * Provenance research and the looting of radio archives
  * Professional practices of radio archiving (e.g. catalogue
    description, metadata enrichment, selection and deaccessioning), and
    archivists as data/information specialists
  * Technologies of the archive (e.g. index cards, finding aids)
  * Materiality of archival records (e.g. recorded sound,
    paper/photographic documentation)
  * Archival uses of particular sound media and recording technologies
    (e.g. disc/tape recording)
  * The effects of decay, neglect or technological obsolescence on radio
    archival collections
  * Various collection types (e.g. off-air radio recordings, sound
    libraries, commercial music collections)
  * Computational humanities and the radio archive, including data
    visualisation


Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biography to 
(trace /at/ uva.nl) by *_15 April 2021_*.

The authors of accepted proposals will be notified by 1 May 2021, and 
the ‘position papers’ (2000-4500 words) will be expected by 1 September 
2021. Further information will follow on the conference format, but it 
is certain that online participation will be possible, and a special 
issue publication, with selected papers, is planned.


The workshop is hosted by the research project *TRACE (Tracking Radio 
Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960)*, which is funded by the 
Dutch Research Council (NWO) and supported by the Amsterdam School for 
Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) and Department of Media 
Studies, University of Amsterdam. For further information, please see 
www.trace.humanities.uva.nl <http://www.trace.humanities.uva.nl>.

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