J. Noordegraaf

Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives

This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rapidly developing technologies that cross over into other domains such as broadcasting and social media, have challenged the traditional infrastructures for the collection, preservation and exhibition of art. Addressing these challenges, the authors provide a historical and theoretical survey of the field, and introduce students to the challenges and difficulties of preserving and exhibiting media art through a series of first-hand case studies. Situated at the threshold between archival practices and film and media theory, it also makes a strong contribution to the growing literature on archive theory and archival practices.

'Facing Forward' with found footage: displacing colonial footage in 'Mother Dao' and the work of Fiona Tan

In 1926, the Dutch cameraman Iep Ochse recorded a fascinating scene on the island of Bali, Indonesia: three toddlers cheerfully smoking a cigarette. The brief shot — it lasts eleven seconds — shows three naked children that fill the frame; they are seated facing the camera, the youngest sitting on the eldest boy’s lap. The latter vigorously inhales and exhales, creating a cloud of smoke that fills the screen. He then passes on the cigarette to the boy on his right and lovingly grooms the lock of hair of the youngest child (Figure 10.1). When this shot was used in a film for the Dutch newsreel production company Polygoon in 1940, the scene was accompanied by a spoken commentary, saying ‘These babies take advantage of the fact that mother went shopping’ (Tropisch Nederland, 1940). The scene is thus being explained as an example of innocent, naughty behaviour that occurs when mothers leave their children alone.

Competent museum guides: defining competencies for use in art and history museums

ABSTRACT This study aimed to identify the competencies required for museum guides who lead tours of school students in art and history museums. We compiled a preliminary list of competencies from the literature and interviews with 16 Dutch museum guides and three educators. Next, the Delphi technique was used to validate the list of competencies. A total of 26 experts, consisting of 12 educators, 9 guides, and 5 teacher trainers, rated the importance of the competencies and the clearness of the formulation on a 5-point Likert scale. In two rounds, consensus was established on 45 competencies. We organized the competencies into four areas: (1) handling the group within the museum environment, (2) communication skills, (3) knowledge and pedagogy, and (4) professionalism. The list of competencies gives museums insight into the competencies museum guides should have, can help guides reflect on their own practices, and stimulates them to further develop their own competencies.

Post-observation conversations in the museum: using the self-evaluation of the supervisee as the starting point

ABSTRACT Post-observation conversations are often used to discuss the quality of teaching and education; however, little is known about the use of this method for the evaluation of teaching in museums. Drawing on interviews, in the first research question, we explored how museum guides (n = 14) and educators (n = 8) perceived a post-observation conversation when they used the guides self-evaluation as the starting point. This is in contrast to the educator (observation) directed conversations that currently prevail in the participating museums, all located in the Netherlands. For the second research question, we coded seven conversations in order to investigate the guides’ and educators’ actual participation. Results indicate that guides felt a sense of ownership; furthermore, the participants evaluated the conversations as more equally balanced. Analysis of the conversations confirmed that there was a balanced interaction and that the guides greatly influenced the conversations content.

Capturing the Ineffable: Collecting, Analysing, and Automating Web Document Quality Assessments

Automatic estimation of the quality of Web documents is a challenging task, especially because the definition of quality heavily depends on the individuals who define it, on the context where it applies, and on the nature of the tasks at hand. Our long-term goal is to allow automatic assessment of Web document quality tailored to specific user requirements and context. This process relies on the possibility to identify document characteristics that indicate their quality. In this paper, we investigate these characteristics as follows: 1 we define features of Web documents that may be indicators of quality; 2 we design a procedure for automatically extracting those features; 3 develop a Web application to present these results to niche users to check the relevance of these features as quality indicators and collect quality assessments; 4 we analyse users qualitative assessment of Web documents to refine our definition of the features that determine quality, and establish their relevant weight in the overall quality, i.e., in the summarizing score users attribute to a document, determining whether it meets their standards or not. Hence, our contribution is threefold: a Web application for nichesourcing quality assessments; a curated dataset of Web document assessments; and a thorough analysis of the quality assessments collected by means of two case studies involving experts journalists and media scholars. The dataset obtained is limited in size but highly valuable because of the quality of the experts that provided it. Our analyses show that: 1 it is possible to automate the process of Web document quality estimation to a level of high accuracy; 2 document features shown in isolation are poorly informative to users; and 3 related to the tasks we propose i.e., choosing Web documents to use as a source for writing an article on the vaccination debate, the most important quality dimensions are accuracy, trustworthiness, and precision.

Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives

Recensie van: Francis X. Blouin Jr. en William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives. New York (Oxford University Press) 2011, 257 p. isbn 978 0 19 974054 3