My research involves two domains.
One of these is the ‘Development of Dutch television culture in a European context’. This research topic studies the development of television culture in the Netherlands taking into account European developments. It addresses questions of both production and consumption as practices that could be observed as a result of television’s role in the process of modernisation. For this purpose I coordinate a newly founded European Television History Network in co-operation with colleague Andreas Fickers: www.televisionhistory.eu.
The network aims to connect people, to exchange research and experiences, and eventually to develop integrated research projects that have potential to be supported by the European Commission Research. The long-term objective is to cluster and integrate European research activities supporting and strengthening the European research space in the field of TV history.
The ETH Network co-operates with European research projects, such as Video Active (finished September 2009) and EUscreen (October 2009-October 2012): www.euscreen.eu.
EUscreen
The major objective of EUscreen is to stimulate the use of television archive content for the widest range of European user constituencies and communities and thus to advance active engagement with the cultural memory of Europe both at a national and a European level. Through its synergy with Europeana (www.europeana.eu), EUscreen enables alignment of European audiovisual content with the digitised cultural heritage of Europe.
EUscreen achieves this by building a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material, which supports the exploration of Europe’s television heritage in changing contexts. A critical mass of audiovisual content and its metadata will be made accessible through the EUscreen platform. EUscreen investigates, exploits and extends existing tools in order to create a highly interoperable environment to enable content sharing among the EUscreen partners and with Europeana, for which EUscreen will deliver the audiovisual component.
Solutions for contextualisation from a comparative European television perspective have been proposed through the development of editorial mechanisms and the development of user-led activities such as rating and tagging systems, blogs etc, to support use of programme content.
In developing such demand-led access, the project aims to create appropriate conditions for multicultural and multilingual access and use of audiovisual (television) content. Through investigation of user specifications, EUscreen develops and evaluates use case scenarios for using content for research, learning, and leisure and creative re-use regardless of the language and cultural boundaries. Furthermore the content will be analysed and contextualised in a European perspective in an e-journal.
Possible new topic: the Eurovision Song Contest in a European perspective: showcasing changing identities:
About the history of the Eurovision Song Contest, part one:
Of bekijk de flash versie.
About the history of the Eurovision Song Contest, part two:
Of bekijk de flash versie.
Satire
At another point Dutch TV culture is researched in an international context in a NWO-fundeed project The power of satire (www.powerofsatire.org) where we bring together scholars investigating the cultural impact of satire in different countries, different media and different time periods.
Erik de Vries
I have finished a book on the history of Dutch television, focussing on Erik de Vries who was pioneer, cameraman, director and producer. The research was partly funded by the VandenEnde Foundation.
The second research domain is ‘Media and the cultural construction of identity’. This involves production and reception practices in public and particularistic media forms through which people construct and develop notions of cultural identity. I have finished a three year project called CHICAM, which stands for Children in Communication about Migration (www.chicam.net). CHICAM was a three year European research project funded by the European Commission. Theme: Improving Human Resource Potential and the Socio-economic Knowledge Base: New Perspectives for Learning (Framework 5). It was coordinated by the Institute of Education, Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, University of London. The project began in November 2001; it ended October 2004. The Dutch project team at the Utrecht University (Research Institute for History and Culture) also involved media educator Frans van Lokven, MiraMedia (Ad van Dam) and research assistant Frouke Rijsdijk. Chicam addressed three major aspects of structural change in contemporary European society: the increase in global migration, the uses of new communication technologies, and the specific needs of children. It focused on the social and cultural worlds of refugee and migrant children in six European countries. The project aimed to explore and develop the potential uses of media and communication technologies as means of empowering these children and enabling them to realize their potential.
The results have been published in several reports. Also the results have been theoretically framed in a couple of articles. Follow ups have been realized within the European Research Association ECREA, the Diaspora, Migration and the Media thematic working group, of which I am vice-chair and through the Media and Diaspora thematic field of Focus area Cultures and Identities at Utrecht University.
