[Commlist] CfP Archive Television: Storing, structuring and accessing content in the time of algorithmic curation (VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture)

CfP VIEW Issue #26: Archive Television: Storing, structuring and 
accessing content in the time of algorithmic curation**

Guest editors: Giulia Taurino (Northeastern University), Georgia Aitaki 
(Karlstad University)

Given recent technological advancements, media scholars have been 
discussing a digital, computational, algorithmic turn in television 
(Berry, 2011; Hansen & Paul, 2017; Housley /et al./, 2022), pointing at 
the rising network of infrastructures, content-host and delivery 
platforms and other forms of techno-cultural adaptation that influence 
television production, distribution, and reception. The implications of 
streaming television and its reliance on algorithms have been explored 
in relation to its economy, geography, regulatory practices, social 
uses, and power relations (Evens & Donders, 2018; Lobato, 2019; Lotz, 
2022; Chalaby, 2023). In these academic studies, particular attention is 
given to the scale of audiovisual transmission, as well as the 
unprecedented increase of television content, with streaming companies 
able to service several countries and regions all over the world, and 
store hundreds or thousands of titles at the same time, ready to show on 
demand. Considering the overall archival tendency of contemporary media 
ecologies, we propose to investigate algorithmic television first and 
foremost as an attempt to /archive/ television, a medium that for the 
historical fragility of early formats and constant exposure to 
technological transitions has faced an uneven evolution in what concerns 
practices of record-keeping.

In this issue, we would like to bring scholarly attention to the primary 
role of streaming platforms as content repositories, virtual places for 
storing, structuring, and accessing television content via complex 
library systems designed to organize, filter, and retrieve audiovisual 
records, making them available for simultaneous distribution. As 
television archives address similar issues of cataloging and sorting 
large collections, we are presented with an interesting scenario. Due to 
a lack of well-established curatorial protocols for the management of 
audiovisual material, television had to overcome data storage challenges 
since its early years, sometimes leading to non-archival practices, such 
as overwriting or unrecorded live-reporting. Over the years, media 
corporations adopted somewhat dis-homogeneous, temporary solutions for 
content archival and classification while searching for more sustainable 
options. By the time non-commercial television archives were created, 
the content acquired was likely to be either unlabeled, mislabeled, 
incomplete, disorganized or following “non-standardized” labeling 
systems. More recently, the need of streaming platforms to prioritize 
content classification for their economic sustainability made a 
consistent contribution to tackling the issue of cataloging televisual 
records – namely, by investing in the creation of queryable databases, 
scalable media metadata systems and in the development, and 
implementation of algorithms for content indexing. Relying on 
computationally demanding systems, streaming services were able to 
develop semi-automated solutions for information filtering and retrieval 
that might offer a response to the longtime challenge of archiving 
audiovisual content.

In the time of algorithmic media, where algorithmic television (Shapiro, 
2020) counts as an archive in its own right, particular attention is 
given to filtering and recommendation systems and the ways they dictate 
our access to television production. With this issue, we hope to gain 
further insight in the relation between algorithmic curation and 
archive-based curatorial practices, accounting for the intersection 
between coding, programming, and editorial practices, infrastructural 
and operational logics, commercial aspects, copyright licensing, and 
acquisition regulations that affect the ways television is received. We 
invite proposals dealing with the interaction between emerging 
algorithmic technologies and more traditional archival work – whether 
maintained by media corporations for internal profit or by non-profit, 
academic, cultural institutions for heritage preservation purposes –, 
with a focus on forms of curatorship adopted in television archives. We 
are particularly interested in exploring how audiovisual archival 
practices, infrastructures, and geographies of storage have been 
redefined by the introduction of algorithmic-based methods for content 
classification and data management, and how streaming platforms have, in 
turn, integrated former archival approaches. Potential contributions 
might encompass, but are not limited to, the following questions:

·How did archival science transition to streaming libraries in 
algorithmic television?

·How did early television broadcasting tackle the storing and ordering 
of content outside of the programming schedule?

·How are present-day recommender systems influencing the way media 
archives curate audiovisual records?

·How can we understand the spatial logics of archive television 
practices from a historical perspective, considering the transition from 
analog to digital records in archival settings?

·What is the role of the organizational, infrastructure, and subscriber 
geographies in storing, structuring, and accessing content in the era of 
algorithmic media?

·What are the possibilities emerging and the challenges posed by 
algorithmic curation from the practitioners’ point of view?

·Which future developments do we envisage in the practice of building 
and preserving television collections?

The goal of this issue is to cover the pre-history, current evolutions, 
and future consequences of classification, selection, and recommendation 
practices in algorithmic television, drawing a connection with 
pre-existing archival practices and other ways of sorting audiovisual 
records that influence the socio-cultural understanding of televisual 
media and content.

*Submission details*

We invite submissions from broadcast historians, media/television 
studies scholars, audiovisual archivists and television professionals, 
as well as researchers in the field of computer science and information 
systems.

Proposals (max. 500 words) should be submitted by email to 
(journal /at/ euscreen.eu) <mailto:(journal /at/ euscreen.eu)> by *October 16, 2023*. 
Article proposals can (optionally) mention if they will take the form of 
a “discovery” (audiovisual-driven case study) or “exploration” (more 
traditional academic approach; for further info see 
https://viewjournal.eu/about/ <https://viewjournal.eu/about/>). Authors 
are encouraged to send in a short biography with their proposal.

A notice of acceptance of abstracts will be sent to authors by early 
*November 2023.*

Articles (between 3,000 – 6,000 words) will be due on *February 29, 
2024*. Longer articles are welcome, provided that they comply with the 
journal’s author guidelines 
(https://www.viewjournal.eu/about/submissions/ 
<https://viewjournal.eu/about/submissions/>).

All articles will be peer-reviewed. The issue will be published in 
*November/December 2024.*

**

VIEW is an open-access journal and no payment from the authors will be 
required.

Questions about the issue can be directed to: (g.taurino /at/ northeastern.edu) 
<mailto:(g.taurino /at/ northeastern.edu)>



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