Researching the Issued Content of American Newsreels

A Framework for the Analysis of Historical Newsreels

“…Secondly, digitised data are no longer in their original format (Fickers, 2021), and may contain traces left by the production, storage, archiving, digitising, and acquisition processes. For instance, textual descriptions of newsreel content are often added during the digitisation of the material and thus might reflect the perceptions or diligence of the digitisers rather than the activities of the original newsreel authors (Elo, 2020; see also Althaus and Britzman, 2018). As our case study shows in Section III, heavily censored data can also offer relevant results, when interpreted with an understanding that it provides the view of the authorities.…”

“…In addition to addressing dynamics as an important modality of audiovisual content, computational film scholars have also been combining different modalities, such as images and sound (Grósz et al, 2022), spoken texts (Carrive et al, 2021;van Noord et al, 2021), or shown locations (Olesen et al, 2016). Computational studies of newsreels more specifically have addressed the contents of news either on the level of textual descriptions of news story topics Althaus and Britzman, 2018) or at a more granular level combining different modalities by analysing the voice-over text and automatically recognising well-known individuals in the film material (Carrive et al, 2021). An ongoing debate in computational film studies concerns how film creates meaning, what are the most important meaningmaking units, and how they could be best extracted (Chávez Heras, 2024;Burghardt et al, 2020;Burges et al, 2021).…”

“…This discussion connects with the wider question if there are cues in film that create meaning, how to find them, how to decide what to measure, and how to make sure that what is being measured gives responses to salient research questions. Although computational studies of historical newsreels use elaborate methods (Carrive et al, 2021;Althaus and Britzman, 2018) including more explicit discussion on the connection of the research question and the variables can be an important methodological amendment to research.…”

“…For example, if a textual description of the contents was created as a newspaper advertisement or censorship card at the time of producing the newsreels (Werenskjold, 2018;Althaus and Britzman, 2018), the variable connects to the distribution and competition within the cinema market or the political context. If it was created within the digitisation process at a later stage, it should be combined with the interpretations of the later generations of what is noticeable in the contents.…”