Digital Media Archaeology: Digging into the Digital Tool AVResearcherXL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18146/2213-0969.2015.jethc080Keywords:
digital humanities, methodology, digital tools, television archives, newspapersAbstract
Recently, scholarly works started to turn their interest to the epistemological and methodological challenges that research with new digital tools and technologies do pose. In this article, we would like to contribute to this methodological discussion and to shed light on the role of digital tools for media studies, by taking the tool AVResearcherXL as case in point. AVResearcherXL is a new exploratory tool for media studies research, enabling users to search across, compare and visualize both the metadata of Dutch public television and radio programmes, and a selection of Dutch newspaper articles of the Dutch Royal Library. By tracing the word ‘television’ with the use of the tool, we provide a practical use case of doing media archaeology with digital tools for media archives. Our deconstruction shows the importance of a media archaeological approach to look into the materiality of digital technology as well as the relevance of studying the deep material structure of media technology. AVResearcherXL thus could be seen as an archaeological site in which the user or ‘archaeologist’ decides where to dig and which search lights to use. Using AVResearcherXL to do media (historical) research is not about finding the ‘right’ answers, but about contextualising results, and about finding new, sometimes unexpected, pathways and questions.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2015 The Author(s)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-SA 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).