The unique opportunities of audio-visual primary sources in opening up new pathways to discover, learn and create
By Louise Hemmings, Editorial Director at AM.
Some nine years ago now, AM first began collaborating with the British Film Institute (BFI) on Stanley Forman’s ETV/Plato Film collection.
These incredible films were produced in the communist world and so began an amazing voyage of discovery for AM as a publisher, and for the BFI, not only to resee the world as seen by documentary film-makers in the Soviet Union, China, East Germany and beyond, but also in the process of taking this material from physical to digital form. This project became Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda.
As AM’s first dedicated video resource, it was an ambitious project to begin with, comprising of thousands of unaccessioned 16mm and 35mm reels. Preservation was a driving impetus behind digitisation, as is often the case with audiovisual material in analogue formats. The project required us to create customised workflows with the BFI covering aspects such as condition checking, restoration and repair of the physical film by film specialists; evaluating versions of films to digitise; working with Pinewood studios on the digitisation of the film; metadata discovery and indexing to describe what was on the reels and create a catalogue of the collection; transcription for accessibility to support those with impaired hearing; and, of course, building an online platform on which we could publish and display large amounts of AV content and their transcripts.
We learned that working with audio-visual primary source material could stretch our teams in new ways, from learning Cyrillic in order to transliterate titles through to a thorough immersion for the team of AM editors and our digitisation partners at Pinewood in The Communist Manifesto to ensure a firm grounding in the ideological spirit in which these films were made!
We are now considering what audio-visual primary sources mean for AM and our partner archives and libraries in the years to come. Core to our mission is to prompt new research through our primary source collections as well as embedding learning within our primary source literacy products such as AM Research Skills.
Our platform enables libraries to build and curate their own audio-visual resources using the latest technologies. Audio-visual sources are at the heart of the AM ecosystem. They are unique in being remarkably well-equipped to straddle both new research pathways and are placed at the forefront of fresh opportunities to tackle both teaching challenges in the blended, hybridised classrooms which are now commonplace after the pandemic.
Audio-visual primary sources also enlighten new pathways for digital resources. For community histories omitted from the traditional historical record, music, oral storytelling and dance are the chosen modes of expression and transmission. As a recent Ithaka study found1, diversity itself is a key facet in introducing video into learning pathways:
The core pedagogical reasons for teaching with video are to illustrate and reinforce course content, diversify teaching modalities, promote cultural and linguistic understanding, introduce a range of perspectives and expertise, and — in certain fields — teach disciplinary literacy.
The workshops held regularly with our Library Advisory Boards highlight audio-visual content as critical in addressing the demand for historical collections across all departments — sound and video content is a great pathway to prompting interdisciplinary engagement and initial exposure to primary sources.
Alongside the demand for more oral histories and music collections, our library advisors also point to a continued requirement for streamed content representing all aspects of local histories not widely represented in the media, right through to social justice and global political speeches. The opportunities offered by this material type runs from both depictions of lived experience and individual histories to commentaries and coverage of major global geopolitical events.
Socialism on Film is one of our most heavily-utilised resources and our Engagement team regularly works with teaching staff to support their use in streaming the content in their lessons.
At the University of Iowa, Socialism on Film is used to support History Matters, a course which is designed to appeal to non-history students. The instructor relayed to our team that the Russian Revolution is one of the most popular modules on this course partly because Socialism on Film shows students that it is real people, not characters, in history and that short clips of footage help to bring the topic alive.
At George Mason University, Socialism on Film was used to reinvigorate wider engagement with history as a discipline. Use of the collection remains high at George Mason, with the resource consistently registering a significant portion of overall usage of digital resources. Professor George Oberle notes that:
Using Video Recordings as a Primary Source was impactful for many students because it is a medium in which they are greatly familiar with and use every day. The Socialism on Film dataset was particularly helpful to have students engage with the idea of video being created for a particular purpose and thus encouraged deep critical thinking about the sources themselves. Finally, the students were able to edit and utilise the key clips from the films as evidence to demonstrate their mastery of historical analysis and core concepts taught in the course. In the end, the use of video as a primary source was exactly what we wanted to have students work with because it showed that evidence comes in many different modalities.
Since launching Socialism on Film, our audio-visual experience has broadened with the creation of publications such as Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings, which draws on audio recordings, video, objects and ephemera to provide anthropological explorations of the lives of global communities through musical traditions.
Relationships - from communities to collection holders (whether a university library, a film archive, or indigenous communities) — are never more critical than when working with audio-visual primary source material in helping to build rich and carefully-framed audio-visual primary source resources.
Equitable access was integral to the development of the Ethnomusicology resource — cultural institutions linked to the recordings have been provided with open access, and we have also undertaken to provide digital files to members of source communities represented in the resource.
This great appetite for audio-visual resources is enormously exciting to us at AM but equally critical here is the requirement not simply to render, but to illuminate this unique material in specific ways. In an interview with Martha Fogg in Against the Grain last year, she noted that:
Digital technology has given us an unbelievable wealth of data, but being ‘digitally native’ does not mean that today’s students have necessarily acquired the skills to critically interrogate, effectively search or understand the sources of their data.
As audio-visual content is so ubiquitous in culture, inbuilt assumptions and cognitive pathways have evolved to allow us to assimilate such content with ease, making it especially vital that we provoke critical, active engagement with such sources.
Our resources are designed carefully as multi-layered experiences to support users with different needs. It is especially vital that this user experience is at the fore for digital resources comprised of video and audio sources.
Recent research has illustrated various challenges in the wider dissemination of video content in particular. Our own experience points to some challenges with embedding audio-visual content effectively in teaching.
Library search and discovery may not be optimised to support AV content and users can feel overwhelmed by questions around copyright. These factors should directly impact upon the curation and presentation of audio-visual primary source collections to ensure that learning and discovery routes are explicit, and within resources there are opportunities for user-led discovery. Publishers must also continue to collaborate closely with teaching staff to echo their needs and requirements in the structure of our resources.
Ithaka’s recent study2 suggests that active teaching strategies are especially critical when using audio-visual material in the classroom in order to maximise learning outcomes:
How instructors use streaming video determines its pedagogical success, and instructors need to invest significant intellectual time and energy into developing effective teaching strategies... To best leverage the potential for streaming video to enhance student learning, faculty must make deliberate choices about which content to use, how much content to use, and how to present it.
Meanwhile at Virginia Tech, our Engagement team learned how students enjoy the “undiscovered” nature of the BFI material and the direct connection with non-western perspectives conveyed in the films.
Films offer a pause point from textual primary sources or secondary content. The class is split into groups to actively engage with the films from different vantage points, sparking the students to identify the prevailing narratives behind the films.
Students write summaries of the films they see and plot these on an interactive timeline to help build an understanding of the wider historical actors and events. As was highlighted in Sage’s White Paper of 20183, the impact of video in higher education is acute given the advent of the “flipped classroom” where the classroom space becomes an active space for discussion and new approaches to pedagogy which:
Places students at the heart of their learning experience […] instead of didacticism, students control aspects of their learning […] Video clips can trigger problem solving for instance, to provide tangential information, or present solutions at the end of a learning process.
What does successful engagement in use of audio-visual content look like? What metrics should be used to measure this engagement? Recent commentaries have considered how to measure the role of audio-visual content in knowledge development and critical thinking.
There may be risks as well as benefits of video and engagement4 — it requires greater self-discipline on behalf of the student and potential isolation, with attitudes to technology being especially pivotal.
Short videos are generally seen to be more efficient to support teaching but when working with primary source content, this may not best represent the content itself so we must consider barriers to discoverability and engagement which are unique to this source content.
In essence, there is a “great deal more work to do to understand measures of success in this impact — understanding what design, content will drive success in emotional response to watching video and their learning performance.”5
AM’s platform Quartex allows hosting and streaming of audio-visual materials so that end-users are able to access all primary source content through the same interface, breaking down barriers to access, encouraging greater adoption in the classroom environment and search across a whole corpus regardless of material format.
Audio-visual primary sources will continue to be pivotal for AM. The requirement for curated teaching-led resources and the need to build confidence for teaching staff around framing assignments with AV sources will be vital for the learning pathways established in new products, but we will be equally focused on building in equitable access and community expertise into AV products.
Future products will continue to push disciplinary boundaries and foster new community relationships and fresh research. Focusing on discoverability of sources through transcripts and full text search alongside newly-created metadata and captioning will also continue to drive AM’s technological developments in the presentation and accessibility of audio-visual content.
For the Bay Area TV Archive (held at San Francisco State University), migration to our SaaS platform Quartex was prompted because of a desire to transcribe and offer closed captions for their audio-visual collections. This has not only enabled accessibility standards to be met but has also greatly improved discoverability of their collections.
Beyond teaching and research, preservation and dissemination of audio-visual sources is just as critical. For our teams, conversations with global libraries and archives are focused with increasing urgency on the wealth of collections in analogue formats which are approaching critical levels of degradation.
As we have considered here, the unique impact and inherent worth of audio-visual primary sources for higher education teaching and research, preserving these unique collections must be a collective priority for archives, libraries and publishers.
Further Reading
- AHA Perspectives on teaching History: Teaching History with YouTube | Perspectives on History | AHA (historians.org)
- 11 Ways to Use Multimedia Videos in History Lessons: 11 Ways to Use Multimedia Videos in History Lessons / Historical Association
- Using Video in the History Classroom Using Video in the History Classroom | History Today
Endnotes
1. Ithaka S&R study on Teaching with Streaming Video Teaching with Streaming Video
2. Id.
3. SAGE Video White paper from 2018 https://us.sagepub. com/sites/default/files/hevideolearning.pdf
4. SAGE research on video and scientific literacy for Charleston Library Conference 2022 Carmichael, Forrest, Frost and Ruediger https://group.sagepub. com/press-releases/is-streaming-video-the-key-todeveloping-scientific-literacy-for-students
5. Schrum-Teaching-history-online-1.pdf (bu.edu)
This article was first published in Against the Grain, September 2023.
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