Media Archives: Political and Technological Interventions

3 units

Media archives structure our knowledge of film and TV's past. They help determine what survives of today's media productions into the future. While that gatekeeping work might seem opaque from the outside, an array of archivists and curators, both professional and amateur, are reevaluating what gets saved to make the historical record more inclusive and complete. This course will introduce you to the debates and new technologies that are transforming moving image archiving. It mixes readings and discussions of scholarly works and professional white papers with hands-on activities to show how the seemingly apolitical labor of archivists, like cataloging and reference, reflects ideologies of professionalism, gender, class, and race. While introducing you to the current best practices in digitizing media for long-term preservation, it will also ask you to analyze how those professional standards came into being. This class is made possible by WashU Libraries Film & Media Archive's (FMA) collections and legacy technologies, as well as its staff's time and expertise. As such, we will focus on areas of moving image archiving that the FMA specializes in including nontheatrical film, the 16mm film format, social justice documentaries, and Black media production. In this course, you will gain: a knowledge of archival practices an introduction to the concepts of archival power and efforts to democratize the preservation of our shared cultural heritage an overview of moving image archiving profession including the range of institutions, collections, and jobs in the field an understanding of legacy media formats and playback technologies hands-on experience repairing and digitizing film and video and an introduction to digital preservation strategies and open-source tools