Collaboratory Event: Eric Hoyt: From Digitizing Magazines to Preserving Born-Digital Media

Please join our Media Studies Collaboratory in welcoming Eric Hoyt (University of Wisconsin – Madison) for a special lecture, “From Digitizing Magazines to Preserving Born-Digital Media: Reflections on TV Guide, Podcasts, and Media History.”

In this talk, Eric Hoyt plans to use the lecture series theme, “Rethinking Media Archives,” as an opportunity to share work and reflect upon two digital projects that he helps lead at UW-Madison. The first, Media History Digital Library (MHDL), is an open access collection of 2.5 million digitized books and magazines from film and broadcasting history. The MHDL digitizes print texts (most recently TV Guide), a multi-stage process of scanning, post-production, metadata entry, and indexing. The second project, PodcastRE, is a digital repository and research platform for podcasts. Because PodcastRE works with born digital media objects, the workflows necessarily differ a great deal from the MHDL. In particular, the approach to metadata is completely different, emerging from how podcasters choose to describe and define their own work. Hoyt will address questions of authority and agency in metadata, as well as the implications for the study of media history. What lessons can saving podcasts teach us about digitizing and indexing historic issues of TV Guide?

About the Speaker

Eric Hoyt is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Media History Digital Library, which has digitized 2.5 million pages of historic publications. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries Before Home Video and co-editor of The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities. His work has been supported by a number of granting agencies, including the NEH, IMLS, SSHRC, ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation. He is currently working on preserving podcasts, digitizing the collections of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, and enhancing and globalizing the Media History Digital Library.