Truth, Lies & Videotape: Digital Video Archivists Gather at MoMA

We live in a video age. Make that a digital video age. And all those digital video files flying around on the internet or downloaded onto your phone not only provide entertainment or inspiration to current viewers, but could be one of the best windows into our world for future historians. However, files designed to capitalize on the ever-changing whims of digital distribution may not be built for longevity, so archivists worry about their ability to stand as historical artifacts for the long term. Many of those archivists are part of an organization called The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), which held its annual Digital Asset Symposium (DAS) on June 6, 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art.

As the name suggests, DAS examines the shared challenges of managing and preserving digital media content across different sectors. The one-day conference assembles content creators, system designers, archivists, editors, and asset managers to compare experiences, share expertise, and offer creative solutions. Through a combination of case studies, key notes, and panels, DAS examines the full lifecycle of digital content.

DAS 2018 focused on the story of media assets—how they are created, maintained, shared, managed, and assembled to form the stories about the human condition. The program also highlighted the emergence of data science in the field: indeed, the conference started with a thought-provoking keynote called “Truth is a Lie,” in which data scientist Lora Aroyo and research scientist Chris Welty examined the concept of truth as not a single notion but a spectrum of opinions, perspectives, and context. Aroyo and Welty pointed out that data analysis often yields ambiguity and contradictions —so, instead of embracing a binary yes/no approach, they advocate the use quantum intelligence (based on the principles of quantum mechanics) as a new way of analyzing data. The goal is to create descriptions of online AV collections that incorporate a spectrum of truth.

Following that mind-expansive talk was a presentation from Nicole Martin of Human Rights Watch, an organization that has pioneered the use of video footage to highlight worldwide human rights abuses. In “Archiving Human Rights Video,” Martin discussed how daily production demands are balanced with the organization’s critical need to preserve evidentiary data. She discussed how the production team embraced digital preservation best practices to make its day-to-day tasks easier, while likely helping the relevance and longevity of these very significant documents. Later, Gian Klobusicky and Dalia R. Levine from HBO and metadata architect Sally Hubbard explored the relationship between information science and data science in “Smart Stacking of Data and Information Science.” The panel outlined how these two disciplines can partner together to solve problems that arise when dealing with media content.

The afternoon featured two cases studies. In “Bringing a Century of NHL Content to Life,” the director of the NHL’s Digital Asset Archive Dan Piro recounted the challenge of digitizing the NHL’s entire archive (250,000 hours of AV content, a half-million still images, and over a million documents) in 18 months (!) so that it could be used to create content celebrating the league’s centennial. That was followed by a look at the very high-tech Montreux Jazz Digital Project in “Object Storage and the Modern Media Archive,” in which Dr. Alain Dufaux, described the collaboration between the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the Claude Nobs Foundation The project includes over 5,000 hours of broadcast-quality live concert footage preserved digitally and transformed into an archive of “raw material,” which the university’s “Metamedia Center” uses to create such slick projects as its Jazz Heritage Lab.

Finally, the session wrapped with a special keynote panel called “The Making of Netflix’s Bobby Kennedy for President.” On the 50th anniversary of the death of Robert Kennedy, four key members of the production team discussed how this four-part documentary series came together. Led by moderator Matthew White, co-producer of The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, the panel traced the collaboration between the director, editor, and producers: how they sourced new archival material, how the search for this material served as inspiration, and how large-scale documentary series are performing critical preservation functions.

It was a fitting finale for a one-day conference that seemed to span continents, as well as the fruitful interrelations between science and art, politics and personal responsibility, and —especially— past and future.