This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
Internet Archive has begun digitizing the 40,000 videotapes of television recorded by a single woman over the past 45 years.
Initial reports stated that the original volume of tapes was closer to 140,000, but this trove still represents an almost nonstop database of television news even in the era of 24-hour cable coverage. Marion Stokes had put her life on the schedule of six-hour cassette tapes, getting up early in the morning to put new tapes in, and cutting meals short to make sure MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC, and CSPAN were all covered on the eight recorders she had running.
While the Vanderbilt Television News Archive has recordings back to 1968, they only allow researchers to borrow DVDs from their collection. The Internet Archive is going to put it all online. The effort is estimated at around $500,000. The shipping alone for the cassettes was reported to have cost $12,000.
WNYC's On The Media program did a piece on this from their Internet-focused podcast, TLDR. It's a nice listen.
The first digitized programs are already available for download. It's roundtable discussion program from Philadelphia's WCAU-TV10 called Input that Stokes herself produced in the late 1960's.
I wonder what developments will make this and other video databases more easily searchable. The ability to index and search newspaper text has allowed me to do research that would not have been possible 10-15 years ago. I wonder when automatic audio transcription technology (akin to Youtube's automatic closed captioning) will become available and widely used.
The Google Art Project is fantastic. Travel is costly, and many people would love to walk through a museum. This program is a great way to do so without being there. Google Earth, but specifically inside museums. I only wish more museums would approach them in order to sign up--as the project does not actively seek museums, rather it is up to the museums to actively seek them. This topic opens up a wonderful range of issues (and discussions) in the access to history and museums. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project