NFA Day 2024

Uhlenbeck Lecture: Listening with the digital archive: voices and silence, music and noise

Starting in the late 2000s, mass digitization has transformed the way we access and engage with material from the past.  Digitized sources in multiple formats from text to images to audiovisual files are now available in overwhelming abundance, to the extent that we now make increasing use of digital tools to read through it all.  This talk builds on concepts from radio studies, as well as my own and others’ recent projects to explore one way we might make sense of this abundance.  It proposes that we take up listening, rather than reading, as a core metaphor for how we approach the digital archive both from an analytical and ethical standpoint. From this point of departure, it will walk through a series of sonic metaphors that highlight both what we can ‘hear’ with the digital archives, but also how we might fruitfully engage with the gaps, losses, and noise we encounter.

About Alec Badenoch

Alec Badenoch is full Professor (by special appointment) of Transnational Media at the VU Amsterdam in connection to the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Assistant Professor for Media and Culture at Utrecht University. A media and cultural historian, his research falls primarily into two stands: historical research into transnational entanglements in 20th Century broadcasting (most recently delving into connections between international women’s movements and broadcasting), as well as practice-oriented research on digital heritage in the present. From his chair at the VU he is currently PI on the European project Polyvocal Interpretations of Contested Colonial Heritage (PICCH).  He was at NIAS in 2010-2011 as part of the “Inventing Europe” Theme Group, during which time he developed the “Inventing Europe” online exhibition (inventingeurope.eu), and began his long engagement with digital heritage.