Project Description
Over the past six years, I have worked with students to create an on-campus film & media studies archive that has been evolving in exciting ways. It has grown from a few dusty cabinets to a robust collection of over 250 films,12,000 slides, numerous media journals, first edition books, posters, and a menagerie of editing and viewing equipment. In 2019, we developed a partnership and obtained a new space to ensure the archive's long-term expansion. This past fall, we offered our first Film and Media Archives practicum. We also partnered with the Center for 21st Century Studies for a “Teaching Media Archives” colloquium, and with the UWM Archives to host Milwaukee’s first International Home Movie Day. All of these efforts are expanding opportunities for student research and professionalization. With this year’s focus on “Media Archive Activism,” this forward-looking project will continue to explore the challenges, questions, and opportunities that analogue and digital humanities tools present for today’s media scholars, as digitization offers new means for creating, preserving, sharing, and teaching moving image archives.
Tasks and Responsibilites
The overall objectives and methods of this project include providing access to rare materials and developing collaborative projects (with Association of Moving Image Archives), while engaging in dynamic forms of scholarly production and online publishing. Through this project, students will learn professional methods and workflows for preserving and archiving 16mm films, and will actively ensure that these prints can be used for on-campus and in-class programming this year and for years to come. This involves manually inspecting and assessing the films’ projection quality, carrying out splicing or repairs, and digitizing selected clips and materials. Students will be responsible for researching and indexing these materials for an online platform we have begun developing. In addition, they will conduct scholarly research on media archives, manage the archival equipment, as we integrate the materials into our archive practicums and workshops. Finally, following the success of our first International Home Movie Day--which involved creating a workflow, getting the films in one place, inspecting them, setting up projection, and creating an environment for public discussion (e.g. live identification, home movie bingo), students will continue to develop new, fun and creative means of using the archive to foster and grow a more inclusive and affirming community, as we plan for Home Movie Day 2023!