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Large datasets of visual daily culture- Large datasets of visual daily culture: Why they're important; Who's studying • Why they're important them; and the Challenges for scholars, • Who's studying them scholarship, pedagogy, and stewards • Challenges for scholars, scholarship, pedagogy, and stewards Howard Besser Director, NYU Moving Image Archiving & Preservaon M.A. Program hp://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/

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Why visual representations of daily Ephemeral media from culture are important everyday life – Works that document everyday life • Amateur films • Home movies • Anthropological footage • Daily news and Newsreels • Other raw footage and out‐takes – Works that reveal the priories of powerful social forces • Industrial films • Government films – Works created to influence us • Educaonal films • Adversements

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Local Cultural events‐‐Bumba‐Meu‐Boi Media News

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Documentaon of Events AN, 2001

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Pre‐WWII small‐town life (6:36) Images with Sound are crical to hp://www.archive.org/details/sIvanBes1938_2 understanding our cultural heritage

• We are shaped by the cultural icons of our childhood (Leave it to Beaver, Lassie, James Bond, police shows, Mickey Mouse, Road Runner, …) • We are also shaped by the adversements, industrial, and educaonal films of our childhood (Maytag repairman, How to be a good homemaker, …) • To understand our me period, people in the future will need to have access to the cultural arfacts of our me (imagine trying to understand 1950s and 1960s gender dynamics without pop cultural views of the family)

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Post‐WWII Ausn (5:50) Instruconal (0:50‐2:13) hp://www.archive.org/details/WathenCo48 hp://www.archive.org/details/AreYouPopular1947_442

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Duck and Cover‐ Sponsor: U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration, 1951 Downloaded 2002 from Prelinger Archive hp://www.archive.org/

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Everyday Facebook pages become Everyday photos become historically important historically important

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Who's studying these?‐ Orphans

• Orphans Symposium • Center for Home Movies • Sponsored Films • Prelinger Collecon • …

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Orphans Films Orphans

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Orphans Orphans

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Texas Connecons—Orphan Films Center for Home Movies

• Office at Library of Congress Naonal Audiovisual Conservaon Center • Non‐profit fundraising organizaon • hp://www.centerforhomemovies.org/

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Home Movies have made inroads with Home Movie Day tradional film preservaonists • “Saving our film heritage should not be limited only to commercially produced films. Home movies do not just capture the important private moments of our family's lives, but they are historical and cultural documents as well. Consider 's 8mm film that recorded the assassinaon of President Kennedy or Nickolas Muray's famously vibrant color footage of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera shot with his 16mm camera. Imagine how different our view of history would be without these precious films. Home Movie Day is a celebraon of these films and the people who shot them. I urge anyone with an interest in learning more about how to care for and preserve their own personal memories to join in the fesvies being offered in their community...” ‐Marn Scorsese

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HMD‐now throughout Home Movie Day North America • Began in a few cies August 2003 • Has grown exponenally

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HMD‐now also Worldwide DVD from Home Movie Day

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Center for Home Movies Center for Home Movies‐‐Summit —Summit • “Very simply put, the queson is: what would be needed (to do, have, spend, work around, etc.) in order to undertake a mass digizaon project involving home movies and from public and private collecons online for free public access over the next five years? Secondly, what impact would the availability of these collecons have on their use and analysis?”

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Center for Home Movies Quote from Summit Portal Project • How can we go beyond simply saving materials and make history and • culture pernent? I think home movies and amateur film might be just How can we relavely quickly put online 1,000 what we need to link archives with an ever‐growing public. They're hours of home movies and make them inherently populist without being simplisc. They're documentary in all its chaos and purity, yet express an infinity of encing narraves. They lend useable for study? themselves to appreciaon and analysis in a wealth of domains, many yet – Technical issues to be imagined. As the biggest chunk of the vast and mostly unknown body of nontheatrical moving images, they offer scholars many lifemes – Metadata issues of invesgaon. Intensive work with home movies will also change archival pracce and workflow, and I think it will help archives garner the – Intellectual property issues public support they need in order to flourish. – Sustainability issues ‐Rick Prelinger – Adopon issues – Workflow

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Portal Project— Portal Project—

Taxonomies example (1/4) Taxonomies example (2/4) • Possible Genre categories: • Possible Tropes by Human Behavior – Milestone film (weddings, bar mitzvahs, Christmases, birthday pares, – Coming of Age/Childhood Development /Milestone Moment etc.) – The "Check out our stuff" mof – Family at Leisure – Self‐documentaon/Self‐aggrandizement – Family business/Livelihood – "Oh no he didn't!” – Public events – Images of the Beloved – Travelogues/Community portraits – “Mugging” for the Camera – Amateur Dramas – Trainspong – Art Film – “Look Ma, no hands”. – "Look, an animal! And it's so close I can feed it a potato chip!" – Human Diversity as Curiosity

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Portal Project— Portal Project—

Taxonomies example (3/4) Taxonomies example (4/4) • Possible Tropes by Recurring Imagery • For each Trope, Genre, etc., think about – Parades applying literary studies techniques: – Public Events • How would we define each of these? What core elements need to be present? – The Road • How frequently does each occur, and under what – Gardens condions? – Special Weather • What types of variants are there within a given trope or – Demolions and Construcons genre? • How do the tropes or genres relate to each other? • What other tropes or genres have not yet been defined?

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Texas Connecons‐‐Center for Home Movies Sponsored Films

• 300,000 Industrial & instuonal films were commissioned by businesses, charies, educaonal instuons, and advocacy groups • Interest in these developed through stock footage, Prelinger Films, Ephemeral Films, … • Interest grew much wider when 1,000 from Prelinger collecon were put onto archives.org • More intense interest from Orphans Film Symposium • More scholarly interest‐

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Field Guide Field Guide‐Scholarly

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Field Guide Prelinger Collecon

• Used to collaborate on this scholarly study of 452 films • Over 100 collaborators coordinated their efforts

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Prelinger sub‐collecons Prelinger Tag Cloud

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Prelinger Archive Mash‐ups Texas Connecons‐‐TAMI

• 244 films • “What happens when you make close to 2,000 ephemeral public domain films freely available on the Web? People make art and more films are born!” • “Here’s a sample of films created with Prelinger Archives footage and uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, Rick Prelinger suspects thousands more are uploaded on other video sites.”

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What will future archeologists think when they come across photos like these? Games • Game Industry is larger than film industry • People spend huge amount of me plaing games • Games have spin‐off genres: , Mods, …‐

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Hacked (reprogrammed) Games Texas Connecons‐‐Games

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Challenges for Scholars Challenges for Scholarship- • Everyday materials don’t have the long history of scholarship that “classic” types do. This makes building on other scholars’ • Changing paradigms; Re‐shaping of film history works difficult, and makes convenonal scholars suspicious of • Broadening what constutes the content/subject of work in this arena. study • Corpus of everyday life material is scaered, lile is in repositories, and much of what is in repositories is sll in • What is collected by archives heavily influences what analog form is studied (favoring a “great works” approach) • No agreement btwn scholars or btwn scholars and • What is easiest to study becomes favored (length of repositories about units of measurement or structure (no TEI me to analyze, jusfying your work and producvity equivalent), no taxonomies of tropes and genres, nor to campuswide tenure commiees, qualitave vs metadata to apply to content; as yet, very lile studies of quantave, …) these as texts • Very lile consistent metadata to search across Besser‐TILTS 3/12/11 53 Besser‐TILTS 3/12/11 54

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20 years ago we began the serious study of pre‐cinema Zoetrope

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Changing Cinema Studies Scholarship; Non‐theatrical film study is fairly recent Challenges for Pedagogy • Studies of film as text (semiology in early 1970s) began in the • Teaching w/technology oen requires the instructor to have first decade of the emergence of Cinema Studies departments inmate knowledge of both the subject and the technology • In US, scholarly literature began to appear in mid‐1990s, and • Relying upon technology for teaching results in many possible rapidly increased in new millennium points‐of‐failure (servers, network connecons, data or – Interesngly, a canvas of a dozen university departments housing applicaon corrupon, display devices, …) scholars with mulple publicaons on non‐theatrical films found only • Experiencing the work in a very different environment than one (NYU) with a course devoted to the subject originally intended (classroom, home, screen, … • Western Europe scholarly research began a lile earlier, with • Bandwidth & latency Roger Odin studying amateur cinema from a semio‐linguisc point of view. • Copyright‐ – When home movies become too well‐made, the polish comes at the expense of conviviality in the family, and the detached professional eye replaces the loving eye of the relave (usually the father)

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Connued accessibility Distance Learning: Violang © of Works‐‐Youtomb • monitoring 435,900 YouTube • 23,712 videos taken down for alleged copyright violaon • 109,428 videos taken down for other reasons • hp://youtomb.mit.edu/

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Copyright is a Serious Issue YouTomb We can’t see the one‐me stream of restored Metropolis at this very moment

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Challenges for Stewards Facebook Terms • Standards and tools for consistency at the work level, and units for markup within each work • Selecon and acquision of everyday works – parcularly when works my have a very different future audience than the original intended one—”Duck & Cover” • Scale for ingest of digital everyday material and of applying metadata • Lack of knowledge on how to connue to make complex everyday material available – Link rot, javascript, streaming media, embedded video content that is mulple hops away – With email and social media, we barely can deal with preserving messages, and can’t deal with preserving the social connecons • Gathering from social media that forbid it‐ Besser‐TILTS 3/12/11 63 Besser‐TILTS 3/12/11 64

Facebook Statement of Large datasets of visual daily culture: Why they're important; Who's studying them; and the Rights and Responsibilies Challenges for scholars, scholarship, pedagogy, and stewards We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee • hp://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/ it. We need your help to do that, which includes the following • hp://www.centerforhomemovies.org/ commitments: 1. You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial • hp://www.archive.org/movies communicaons (such as spam) on Facebook. • hp://www.filmpreservaon.org/dvds‐and‐books/ 2. You will not collect users' content or informaon, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesng bots, robots, the‐field‐guide‐to‐sponsored‐film spiders, or scrapers) without our permission. • hp://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/ 3. You will not engage in unlawful mul‐level markeng, such as a pyramid scheme, on Facebook. index.php/fm/arcle/view/958/879 hp://www.facebook.com/terms.php • hp://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/ Last revision: October 4, 2010 • hp://www.nyu.edu/sch/preservaon/

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