About

During the DH2014 conference in Lausanne a group of researchers from the Erasmus Studio based at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision organized a workshop (AVinDH) to assess strategies on how to expand the role of audiovisual media in the field of Digital Humanities. Attendance was high (33 researchers from diverse fields of study) and topics that were discussed encompassed the whole spectrum of audiovisual research practices: photography, film, television, radio, oral history, sound, social media, search technology and infrastructures. The presentations addressed a number of key questions of which the answer is expected to come from digital technology:

• How does the meaning attributed to a photograph change as it becomes iconic over time?
• How can we analyze the spoken word as sound rather than as (just) content?
• How can tools help us make sense of larger collections with different kinds of data, with AV just being one of them?
• What kind of infrastructure might facilitate bringing similar or heterogeneous collections and tools together?
• How might we publish research that includes AV material online?

The discussions were lively and it was clear that having scholars address the topic of AV from so many different perspectives in the context of Digital Humanities created momentum and fuelled imagination. At the same time it was obvious that we had only scratched the surface of the topics that needed to be discussed and explored.

We therefore decided to join forces to further develop our agenda for the future. The structure of a Special Interest Group offered by ADHO perfectly matches our goals and ambitions of creating an international scholarly network.