This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ (M&M) – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

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This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

De amateurfilm en in het bijzonder de home movie is al geruime tijd geen marginaal fenomeen meer. De afgelopen decennia nam in Europa en de Verenigde Staten de interesse voor de amateurfilm toe: als object van historisch en mediawetenschappelijk onderzoek, als inspiratiebron voor kunstenaars en als audiovisuele bron in regionale en nationale archieven. In 1998 werd deze (her)ontdekking van de amateurfilm gevierd op het internationale symposium 'The Past as Present: The Home Movie as Cinema of Record' in Los Angeles. De daar gepresenteerde bijdragen van onderzoekers, archivarissen, kunstenaars en restaurateurs resulteerde tien jaar later in de toonaangevende bundel Mining the Home Movie. Excavations in Histories and Memories onder redactie van Karen Ishizuka en Patrica Zimmermann. In 2010 vond het symposium een vervolg in Cork dankzij het door Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young en Barry Monahan georganiseerde 'Saving Private Reels. An International Conference on the Presentation, Appropriation and Re-contextualisation of the Amateur Moving Image'. Met Amateur Filmmaking. The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web redigeren de drie organisatoren vooral de wetenschappelijke uitkomsten van het congres door opnieuw het terrein van de amateurfilm te verkennen tegen de achtergrond van de alomtegenwoordigheid van amateurfilm in het digitale tijdperk. Dit is een belangrijke doelstelling volgens Rascaroli c.s., aangezien onze tijd blijk geeft van een verregaand gedemocratiseerd mediagebruik in combinatie met een pathos van do-it-yourself (DIY). Daarnaast benadrukken de redacteuren dat de staat van het onderzoeksveld waarlijk interdisciplinair is, wat temeer blijkt uit de omvangrijke opsomming van invalshoeken die in het boek voorbij zullen komen: '