THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE AS PALIMPSEST: HOW ORAL HISTORIES CAN COMPLEMENT THE ARCHIVE
Peter Haratonik, when asked to give a sense of what the field of Media Studies meant to him, referred to “the act of engagement and the appropriate application of the tools available to us - that’s what media studies has always been to me.” Or was it, “the ‘active’ engagement and the appropriate application of the tools available to us”? These two formulations don’t differ too much in their meaning, but the fact that the difference can be contemplated in this case, is relevant both to Peter’s formulation of Media Studies as a concept, as well as to how technological tools - both their innovations as well as their shortcomings - can both enlighten but also complicate ideas.
Listen for yourself:
This example is, for the most part, a slightly amusing diversion (or it potentially points to a deep and even existential threat to the capabilities of technological communication, depending on your interests) that gives us a starting point from which we may consider the state of media studies and its relation to both the archive and to the imperfect practice of collecting and using oral histories for research purposes. It can serve as reminder that there are and will be glitches in the communication stream and that subjective interpretations are inherent in the practice of mining any medium for information or clear ideas. The irony of the juxtaposition of the content of Peter’s statement and the ambiguity of its meaning is not lost on the researcher: even in describing how one achieves the means to communicate effectively, it is hard to communicate effectively.
The question then, that the following experiment deals with is this: when working with oral history recordings and digital archives, what are the tools at our disposal, how do we engage with the content, and how do we mitigate or at least acknowledge the shortcomings inherent in communication?
In this case, both the recordings as well as the archive itself, function as both media and as tools at the same time: they provide not only the content which we mean to communicate, but also provide the means by which we will communicate. The recordings contain information and will be played back in order to relate said information; the archive contain the images, documents and other items and its structure will allow for those items to be extracted and displayed in order to communicate.
As this project is mainly an experiment in how to combine these two kinds of media - audio recording and digital archive - I will begin by explaining the process I underwent to engage them and allow them to work together in the hopes of communicating new ideas or, at the very least, new ways of understanding or engaging with ideas.
The project began with audio recordings of brief oral history interviews, involving Deirdre Boyle, Peter Haratonik, and Kit Laybourne - three individuals involved with the founding and earliest years of the Media Studies program at The New School. As these recordings were to be mined for the information they contained, the first step was to make a catalog, if you will, of their content. While many ideas are being communicated in these interviews, a more elemental form of information exists within them: individual words. Technology is allowing for the ability to not just categorize audio recordings based on keywords, themes, or topics; rather, we are now able to isolate each word spoken and treat that as its own bit of information, thus allowing for a much more granular control and understanding of the interview’s content.
These newly created audio clips can be arranged as the editor sees fit, in whichever way relates to the idea, concept, or recollection that he or she wishes to communicate. The resulting collection of clips can then be exported as a single clips for future dissemination (at this point, some rudimentary knowledge of editing programs is still necessary).
In this experiment, the exported files were uploaded to the online application, “Soundcloud”, for a number of practical reasons. In addition to being readily usable by Scalar, the platform with which this project was built, Soundcloud treats its audio files in two specific ways which will aid in their integration with items contained in the archive. First, the audio files are depicted visually as linear audio waveforms, which allows the listener to see the visual breaks in the audio (which correspond to the edits). I included these breaks in order to explicitly show the seams generated by the editing process; while the audio is undoubtedly edited, the illusion of continuity has been broken and there is no doubt on the listener’s part that there is a wider context from which these clips have been drawn. Secondly, Soundcloud allows for comments and/or annotations to be embedded within the file at specific moments. These can be used by both author and future listener alike, and it is in this part of the process that exciting possibilities regarding the interaction between audio recording and archival materials can begin to be glimpsed. Images, documents, essays, websites, other audio recordings and more can be referenced and linked to within the body of the audio file, in a visually intuitive manner.
Below are a series of audio files created for this project. As mentioned above, they are extracted from interviews with Deirdre Boyle, Kit Laybourne, and Peter Haratonik. Some of the files have links embedded in their comments that lead to related documents contained in the New School archives; while the linking system leaves much to be desired, the concept can at least be understood and appreciated.
Deirdre Boyle reflects on her earliest experiences with Media Studies at The Center for Understanding Media and during the time of the program's shifting affiliation with the Center, with Antioch College, and with The New School for Social Research, as both a student and, later, as a teacher.
Kit Laybourne was one of the first individuals involved with John Culkin, the Center for Understanding Media, and the beginnings of the Media Studies program at The New School.
Peter Haratonik relates some of his earliest experiences as both a teacher exploring new media and his role in the founding and earliest years of the Media Studies program at the New School.
(This item, and others that appear below, taken from the Kellen Archives, is presented for demonstrative purposes; links to this and other files are embedded within the audio files themselves, at or near the times when they are referenced by the speaker)
The Media Studies program did not begin at the New School. Rather, it was conceived as part of the Center for Understanding Media, which was run by John Culkin. It was first affiliated with and accredited by, Antioch College and then, in 1975, became one of The New School's first graduate-level programs. Deirdre, Peter, and Kit give some of their recollections of how the program evolved in those earliest years.
John Culkin was a central figure in both the nascent media studies field generally, and in the establishment of the Media Studies program at The New School. Here, Deirdre, Kit, and Peter reflect on some of his work and his influences.
Deirdre, Peter, and Kit explain some of the core ideas behind the field of media studies and their thoughts on how those ideas were implemented and how they evolved over time as the program at the New School grew.
In the following clip, Peter and Kit describe the development of two of the Media Studies programs signature courses: Media Theory and Media Design, with an emphasis on Kit's ideas behind how he approached the concept of media design.
While the examples presented here are more of a test or experiment than anything else, they also represent the beginning of their own increasingly-complex existence. The idea is not merely that I have created a few audio files and embedded links within them to items which I deem to be relevant to the audio recordings, but that the files, in conjunction with the ever-growing archival body, can also act as a sort of palimpsest, as future listeners can embed new links or even re-edit the audio itself to suit their own communication needs. As the body of audio recordings grows along with the archival collections, this capability will only become more important to the processes of research and communication.
Of course, in the midst of all of these innovative technological tools of communication sits the individual mind with its judgements, subjectivities and idiosyncratic priorities. Speech-recognition technology will improve and archives will expand, but they will not present arguments or ideas on their own - that is left up to the individual, which brings us back to Peter Haratonik’s earlier statement: the “engagement” and “application” he refers to are the essence of media studies; the process I have described above simply employ the latest tools we can use in service of communication.
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