Digging Deeper: Audiovisual Media Archaeology

FaculteitFaculty of Humanities

NiveauBachelor

Studiejaar2026-2027

Beschrijving

Course goals

After completion of this course, the student has:

gained knowledge of theories and debates in the field of digital humanities and audiovisual media archaeology;

become familiar with issues related to the archiving and the digitization of film and television;

practiced with and mastered the methods of digital historiography and source criticism;

made a scientifically substantiated contribution to historiography of film and television in video and written form;

practiced digital skills relevant to the professional work of video search, video editing, and video selection.

Content

In the recent decades, an increasing number of digital-born and digitized materials has become available for film and television researchers, ranging from remastered 4K films on blu-ray, 3D scans of cameras, digitized broadcast magazines to automatically generated subtitles. In this course, film and television are approached as material objects, both physically and digitally.

As media archaeologists, you will delve into (digitized) film and television objects. We will examine the look, feel, and handling of apparatuses such as cameras, television screens, and projectors, along with their digital counterparts, where sensing, tinkering, and experimentation with these (digital) objects play a central role. In addition, we will explore the origins of the objects under investigation, e.g. what were they originally intended for, who created them, how do their recordings look and sound, and who holds the copyrights? The course investigates the materialities of recordings, ranging from analogue and grainy images and sounds to digitally restored, digital-born, and AI-generated materials. We will pay particular attention to concepts such as traces, formats, gaps, absences, losses, errors, and glitches.

By combining theories from media archaeology and digital humanities, you will learn to critically analyse analogue and digital objects and their metadata, identify the traces left behind in digitized materials, and experiment with innovative historiographical methods such as tinkering and sensory analysis.

This practice-based, hands-on course introduces digital methods for contextualizing objects and offers practical experience in working with (digitized) audio and video equipment and recordings. As a mid-term assignment, you will create a portfolio (e.g. video-essay) for which you consult digital sources related to your chosen objects. As final paper you will conduct an in-depth digital historiography of one of the objects of your mid-term. A site visit to a Dutch audio-visual archive, such as Eye Filmmuseum or the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, is part of the course.

This course is the third course in the specialisation track Doing Media Heritage: Texts, Institutions, Curation.

Additional information

Priority rules
This course has priority rules and a waiting list. Your enrolment is guaranteed if you
- are a student in the BA Media and Culture and this course is part of your specialisation (verdiepingspakket)
- are a student in the BA Liberal Arts and Sciences or Taal- en Cultuurstudies and this course is part of your specialisation (kernpakket)

In all other situations, you will be placed on a waiting list if you enrol in this course. For any remaining slots in the course, lots are drawn among the students on the waiting list.

Schedule
Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final, and may still be modified until the third Wednesday in September.

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