ABSTRACT
Researching media history is a slippery endeavor, a veritable treasure hunt to track down sources and to keep them from disappearing into the dustbin of history. Bringing to mind images of khaki-covered and pith-helmeted antiquities seekers, private archivist Rick Prelinger has bestowed the moniker of media archaeology on “the protracted sifting through of accumulated media detritus that so often gets swept under the historical rug” (Lewis-Kraus 2007, 55). Media texts themselves are scarce, with archives hard to locate and often difficult to access through the institutional or corporate channels that guard them. Even more challenges face the historians of digital media since their sources come and go, websites disappear from existence, and key texts are constantly changing, refusing to be frozen in time. We live with the enigma of the disappearing referent: by the time our histories see print, our indexical references may no longer point to anything that still exists. For archivists in the midst of a massive paradigm shift between print and digital culture, the looming task is to catalog-and digitize-more than a century’s-worth of media images. As journalist Scott Carlson (2005) has noted, “Without organization, any history of moving images will be a cacophonous mass.” Archives today stand at a significant crossroads in terms of making historic media texts and documents accessible not only to academic researchers but also to new audiences who are consuming historic media in new ways, as well as consumers-turned-producers (e.g. amateur videomakers posting their work on YouTube). Beyond the massive paradigm shift leading to the digitization of historic and contemporary media documents, a shift is happening in the attitude of corporate producers and owners regarding proprietary ownership and the potential benefits of sharing archival texts. Cultural attitudes are changing from a concept of archives as public domain to an ideology of archives-forprofit.
