FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

Sign language is a crucial mode of communication for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community. However, sign language content in video archives often lacks structured indexing and accessibility, making it difficult to search, analyze, or utilize for linguistic research and education. This proposal aims to develop a computer vision-based system to automatically detect, track, and analyze sign language motions in video archives, enabling efficient retrieval and study of sign language content.

This project proposes a novel approach to enhancing sign language accessibility in video archives using computer vision and deep learning. By implementing automatic recognition, annotation, and searchability, the proposed system will provide valuable tools for researchers, educators, and the DHH community.

This presentation explores the evolution of video and audio production utilizing archive footage at ORF, tracing three decades of innovation and creative programming. Initially, the ORF Archives production teams focused on creating cost-effective programs solely from existing archive material. Over time, their role expanded as they began collaborating with various editorial departments, integrating new footage into their projects. This collaboration has fostered a comprehensive understanding of production workflows, resulting in mutual benefits for both the archive team and the broader organization.

The transition from archive researcher to archive journalist has necessitated the acquisition of new skills and ongoing training, marking a significant shift in the team's capabilities. This presentation is illustrated through numerous video examples that demonstrate the enhancement in quality and creativity of the programs produced, culminating in tri-medial broadcasting.

A highlight of the ORF-archive is the program “From the Archives,” which features live audiences and live web streaming since its inception in 2011. Archive journalist Regina Nassiri, the creative force of the show, curates and presents the program, welcoming celebrities from stage and screen. The upcoming edition in June 2025 commemorates the 70th anniversary of ORF television, further solidifying Nassiri's status as a celebrated figure in her own right.
This presentation will also address the legal aspects, the advantages and challenges of programs based on archive content and give insights into future projects - an AV-archive must look in both directions: not only to preserve the past but also to look into the future.

By providing a wealth of examples this presentation may inspire other audio-visual archives in their creative endeavors.

Long before TikTok, Instagram and selfies, community-scale media-making narrated decades of everyday history on the Greek islands. Amateur filmmakers captured fleeting moments of public and private life, while public access television stations provided a platform for local news, events and creative expression. This parallel session presents the amateur video and broadcast archive of Aigaio TV, a regional public-access television station headquartered in Syros island, Greece functioning between 1988-2009.

Specifically, the session presents methodologies for community based documentation and access of audiovisual material developed during the 2024 edition of APEX, the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program originating from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. In collaboration with Archipelago Network, a Greece-based nonprofit organization for research and documentation of audiovisual heritage and knowledge in the Aegean region, selected archivists, NYU MIAP Professors and MIAP students worked to exchange knowledge and skills regarding the care of audiovisual materials, cataloging, metadata management, digitization, digital preservation, and access to collections.

Today, accelerating forces such as overtourism and the global climate crisis exert local pressures on the island communities of the Aegean, threatening their cultural heritage and environmental equilibriums. The Aigaio TV archive, which includes broadcasts covering 30 years of Syros island’s history, contains invaluable documentation of current events, political life and society. Collaborative models for cataloging developed over the course of APEX, as well as public screenings organized subsequently with the local community as a form of documenting anonymous/orphan material, provide models for reinterpreting these materials through a contemporary lens and providing access for younger generations of islanders.

In my presentation I aim to understand how discourses, sentiments, attitudes and behaviours reminiscent of the historical past take centre stage in the present. Drawing upon current media portrayals on the rise of far-right politics in the Romania, I investigate how archived television pasts can offer orientations amidst present-day phenomena such as populism, polarization and disinformation, questioning thus the roles and nature of archives as simultaneously technologies of the past, present and future.

Starting from the premise that present-day medial portrayals act as ‘repositories of memory’ (Stoler, 2009, p. 49), I will zoom into several instances of recent media portrayals in Romania that reflect both present-day sentiments in the country as well as reference Romania’s historical past. These media portrayals will form the focus of a feminist approach to archival curation (DWAN, 2017). Feminist-inspired archival curation aims to generate new approaches to engaging with existing archives in ways that connect historical archives with present-day political contexts and in doing so, create new archival forms and reimagine existing archival structures. As part of this feminist curatorial exercise, I will place the selected instances of audiovisual media in conversation with historical archival documents on Romania’s televisual past, so as to arrive at arrive at gaps, omissions and silences in archived historical narratives that are still palpable in the present day.

Using a method that historian Saidiya Hartman (2019) calls ‘critical fabulation’, I aim to open up the potentialities of archival knowledge and provide a demonstrative show-and-tell of what a reconfiguration of archives as technologies of the past may look like and what new imaginaries are prompted through that exercise of reconfiguration.

Rithy Panh’s Meeting with Pol Pot (2024) revisits the haunting Khmer Rouge leader, often in shadow, re-engaging the regime's propaganda archives. This presentation draws from postdoctoral research analyzing mise-en-scène as a method to investigate staging, ideology, and hidden violence within these official films (1975-1979), largely held at the Bophana Center in Cambodia. Our project develops the methodology "recomposition of mise-en-scène", confronting archival images with extra-filmic sources to critically reread intended meanings and reveal internal tensions.

Focusing on leadership representation, this paper examines Pol Pot’s portrayal in the propaganda corpus. Contrary to pervasive collective labor images, Pol Pot and high-ranking officials are selectively present. When appearing (e.g., Défilé militaire khmer rouge, Meeting khmer rouge au stade), the mise-en-scène builds rigid hierarchy, visually separating leaders from populace and emphasizing military power. Official visit images (e.g., Visite de la délégation chinoise et laotienne) depict controlled environments and hint at privileges (palaces, cars, banquets) starkly contrasting with the enforced austerity of the population.

Our analysis articulates these filmic constructions with extra-filmic materials: historiography gives context; regime slogans and Pol Pot’s speeches reveal ideological contradictions (such as demanding sacrifice under the sun while using a fan himself); crucially, victim testimonies about forced labor allow perceiving subtle details in the images – fleeting expressions, exhausted bodies – challenging the regime's monolithic narrative of revolutionary fervor and exposing violence masked by the propaganda’s heroic facade. This approach offers cautionary tales from authoritarian archives about visual regimes disciplining history and bodies, insights crucial for navigating complex realities past and present.

I present an AI-driven system for the automatic retrieval and segmentation of video content in which specific artworks are discussed. Given only the title of a work of art, the system identifies and extracts short, relevant video portions where that artwork is explicitly explained—even when it appears within broader, more general content.

The pipeline follows a multi-step process. First, I perform a keyword-based search across large-scale media archives to retrieve a ranked list of candidate videos—the top-K most likely to contain references to the target artwork. Each selected video is then transcribed using Whisper, with speaker diarization to distinguish different voices.

Next, I segment the transcription into longer monologue-style blocks, where a single speaker talks continuously for at least 30 seconds. These segments, along with the artwork title, are processed by a large language model (LLM), which identifies the portions of speech specifically related to the artwork. All original timecodes are preserved, enabling precise extraction of temporally-aligned subclips.

The output is a curated set of “shorts”—concise video segments that explain the chosen artwork—ready for use in educational, curatorial, or commercial settings. Museums can assemble engaging displays, educators can embed authentic expert commentary into lessons, and media organizations can trace and manage rights related to artwork representations across archives.

Additionally, the LLM can automatically generate relevant questions based on the content of each segment. This makes it possible to associate specific shorts with the questions they answer, enhancing both discoverability and pedagogical value within the archive.

Integrating audiovisual media with related materials in other formats in a user-accessible manner presents a significant challenge for many institutions. However, making these resources available on a unified platform can allow materials to be even more technically expressive and valuable to research. At Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories this integration is particularly critical. Researchers frequently rely on both original motion picture footage of nuclear tests and the corresponding technical documentation to conduct thorough analysis and data interpretation. The labs have recently initiated efforts to address this need by leveraging a video streaming platform that allows us to collocate audiovisual materials with related textual documents, greatly improving accessibility and contextual understanding.

This poster will explore the benefits of combining diverse media formats, the challenges associated with making them accessible to researchers, and the technical obstacles involved in digitizing and preparing historic film materials—particularly those dating back to the early 1960s. As a case study, we will examine the film footage from Starfish Prime, the largest nuclear test conducted in outer space, with associated reports and documentation. This consolidation of information will provide valuable insights into the environmental impacts of the nuclear test and the unexpected effects of an electromagnetic pulse on Hawaii’s electrical grid.

In the Indian entertainment market, competition between television, online streaming content and film is fierce. With managers reluctant to put money where it cannot grow exponentially, broadcast archives of studios are a rarity. As large conglomerates take over smaller media houses, it appears that they are disinterested in preserving their own content, unless it functions as a commodity.

The recent surge in re-releases of older films has prompted studios to scramble for distributor copies for restoration. This is motivated by profit than genuine concern for the film’s artistic or archival significance, highlighting a power dynamic how broadcast data from private studios is valued, influenced by ‘relations of privilege and social control’. (Appadurai 1994).

But small private collectors ardently rescue, safeguard, digitize and archive broadcast collections. Applying the four types of commodities theory by Jacques Maquet (Appadurai 1994) these are ‘ex-commodities’ - materials retrieved from the commodity state and placed in some other state. Broadcast archives of large studios are ‘commodities by destination’- objects intended principally for exchange.

This paper unpacks ‘Everything is possible, and nothing is true’ in broadcast archiving by analyzing the production and archiving policies of two major production studios in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. We ask, what is the cultural and archival value of the content and material when everything is created for consumption, but nothing is deemed fit for retention? We place this treatment next to the meaning-making practices of two private film- related material archives, The Cinema Resource Centre and Archive of Indian Music in South India. With safeguarding their collection and public engagement at the core of their work, we see that individual collectors place immense social and cultural value in preservation and digitization with profits not being their mainstay and collections as ex-commodities.

This essay explores the evolving challenges to freedom of expression and freedom of the press in both historical and contemporary contexts. Starting with the clandestine origins of the Brazilian press in 1808, it examines the persistent tension between media censorship and the right to free speech, particularly during authoritarian regimes like Brazil's 1964–1984 military dictatorship. The discussion transitions to the digital age, highlighting the 2016 controversy where Facebook censored a Pulitzer-winning Vietnam War photo, sparking international outrage and raising questions about corporate control over public discourse. The author argues that while private platforms like Facebook wield immense power, society must actively defend freedom of expression through open debate and legal recourse. The piece concludes with a strong endorsement of democratic values, affirming the necessity of protecting the right to speak freely, even in the face of powerful interests.

This proposal explores representations of tattoo culture in the Music Television Brasil archive, focusing on the 1990s and 2000s — a period of intense cultural and aesthetic transformation in Brazil and the years during which the channel was active. It investigates how MTV Brasil’s programming and music videos catered to youth audiences engaged with alternative aesthetics and bodily expressions, especially tattoos, positioning the network as a key player in legitimizing and popularizing tattoo culture in the country.

The study is grounded in the hypothesis that, by featuring tattooed bodies—both in music videos and among its VJs—MTV contributed to the visibility and cultural recognition of a practice still marked by stigma and marginality. It introduces the concept of “tattooed gestures” to analyze music videos as an emerging audiovisual language and tattoos as bodily inscriptions that function as visual pedagogy, shaping youth identities, styles, and senses of belonging.

The core corpus will comprise over 35,000 Betacam tapes from the MTV Brasil collection, currently held by Editora Abril. Given existing restrictions and preservation challenges, the project proposes an archival intervention that combines institutional dialogue with public campaigns for digitization and access. Complementary material will be drawn from recordings available on the Internet Archive.

This study aligns with the debate on archives as interventions in problematic pasts, examining the tattoo as a historically racialized and subcultural mark. By exploring how tattooed bodies circulated on MTV Brasil and how these representations helped reshape norms around youth and embodiment, the study underscores the value of audiovisual archives as critical tools for understanding cultural change. It also highlights the underexplored significance of the MTV Brasil archive for the broader history of Latin American media and youth cultures.

In this paper I will investigate the role of the hit parade in Europe with special emphasis on the inclusion of the format within national public service broadcasting from late 1950’s and forth. Using the Danish case as my point of departure, I will demonstrate how the hit parade was an important element in relation to a number of processes taking place simultaneously across Europe:

• A general process of internationalization/anglophonization of popular music (a process also often labeled Americanization)
• A counteractive process of nationalization of popular music (charts for regional music)
• A general turn towards a more populist approach to national public service broadcasting
• The constitution of an international youth music/culture

The hit parade (also called “radio charts”) is a radio show format based on a ranking of music, mostly either based on votes, sales reports or airplay statistics. The format, originating in USA in mid-1930s, was imported to Europe during World War II through American Forces Network and similar radio services for the allied forces stationed across Europe. Until late 1950’s and early 1960s hit parades were primarily presented on either these or commercial stations (Radio Luxembourg, off shore stations).

The history of the Hit Parade provides a remarkable foundation for studying how public service institutions have navigated the enduring balance between populism and idealism over time. Generally, the hit parade did not meet the criteria formulated and executed within the scheme of traditional interpretations of public service broadcasting. Several early examples are found around Europe, but the format did not find roots within national broadcasting until late 1959. From then on hit parades started popping up on national stations, partly as a response to competition from commercial radio, but also as an instrument to reach a specific target group, the teenagers.