Audiovisual preservation strategies, data models and value-chains

This is a report on preservation strategies, models and value-chains for digital file-based audiovisual content. The report includes: (a)current and emerging value-chains and business-models for audiovisual preservation;(b) a comparison of preservation strategies for audiovisual content including their strengths and weaknesses, and(c) a review of current preservation metadata models, and requirements for extension to support audiovisual files

Affirmational and Transformational Values and Practices in the Tolkien Fanfiction Community

Fanfiction based on the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien has existed for at least six decades and has been, within the past two, one of the most consistently active online fanfiction communities. Despite this, the fandom has been relatively unstudied by fan studies scholars. This paper considers how Tolkien-based fanfiction corroborates and complicates current theories of fanfiction, focusing especially on a theory proposed by obsession_inc that proposes two types of fandoms: affirmational and transformational. Current thought places fanfiction at the transformational end of the continuum. Using quantitative survey data of authors and readers of Tolkien-based fanfiction, this paper offers evidence that Tolkien-based fanfiction contains significant affirmational components that are an intentional and valued part of many Tolkien fanfiction communities. Authors and readers regard authority, critical functions of fanfiction, and reparative purposes for fanfiction differently than the more commonly studied media fandoms. Yet one cannot say simply that authors of Tolkien-based fanfiction are more affirmational than other fanwriters; instead, evidence shows that authors and readers of Tolkien-based fanfiction navigate transformational and affirmational elements in complex ways, and community cultures often center upon members’ values and practices

Sounding the past: three silent films

The project was an experiment in linking music and poetry to archive films, not only to provide an enhancing accompaniment but, in some cases, with the aim of making something new which would quite profoundly change the way that these films were perceived by audiences

The TREC-2002 video track report

TREC-2002 saw the second running of the Video Track, the goal of which was to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. The track used 73.3 hours of publicly available digital video (in MPEG-1/VCD format) downloaded by the participants directly from the Internet Archive (Prelinger Archives) (internetarchive, 2002) and some from the Open Video Project (Marchionini, 2001). The material comprised advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films produced between the 1930's and the 1970's by corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, educational institutions, and individuals. 17 teams representing 5 companies and 12 universities - 4 from Asia, 9 from Europe, and 4 from the US - participated in one or more of three tasks in the 2001 video track: shot boundary determination, feature extraction, and search (manual or interactive). Results were scored by NIST using manually created truth data for shot boundary determination and manual assessment of feature extraction and search results. This paper is an introduction to, and an overview of, the track framework - the tasks, data, and measures - the approaches taken by the participating groups, the results, and issues regrading the evaluation. For detailed information about the approaches and results, the reader should see the various site reports in the final workshop proceedings

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

3D UK? 3D History and the Absent British Pioneers

The recent television ‘rediscovery’ of a small cohort of 1950s British 3D films (and the producers who made them) has offered a new route into considering how the historical stories told about 3D film have focused almost exclusively on the American experience, eliding other national contexts. This article challenges both the partiality of existing academic histories of 3D, and the specific popular media narratives that have been constructed around the British 3D pioneers. Offering a rebuttal of those narratives and an expansion of them based around primary archival research, the article considers how the British 3D company Stereo Techniques created a different business and production model based around non-fiction short 3D films that stand in contrast to the accepted view of 3D as an American feature film novelty. Through an exploration of the depiction (and absence) of these 3D pioneers from existing media histories, the article argues for a revision to both 3D studies and British cinema history

Pilling–Bedworth ratio of thick anodic aluminium porous films prepared at high voltages in H2SO4 based electrolyte

Thick porous anodic films have been prepared using high voltages in a sulphuric acid based electrolyte. The use of H2SO4 low concentration, low bath temperature and the boric acid as modifier allows the anodic porous film to be significantly thickened preventing its chemical dissolution. A new relation including the Pilling–Bedworth ratio, especially of the thick anodic porous films, is proposed here to take into account the nanoporosity and the anodic current efficiency

Moving Image Preservation in Libraries

published or submitted for publicatio

Segmentation-assisted detection of dirt impairments in archived film sequences

A novel segmentation-assisted method for film dirt detection is proposed. We exploit the fact that film dirt manifests in the spatial domain as a cluster of connected pixels whose intensity differs substantially from that of its neighborhood and we employ a segmentation-based approach to identify this type of structure. A key feature of our approach is the computation of a measure of confidence attached to detected dirt regions which can be utilized for performance fine tuning. Another important feature of our algorithm is the avoidance of the computational complexity associated with motion estimation. Our experimental framework benefits from the availability of manually derived as well as objective ground truth data obtained using infrared scanning. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably with standard spatial, temporal and multistage median filtering approaches and provides efficient and robust detection for a wide variety of test material