FlowTV.org CFP: The Archive

Due Date: Friday, May 7, 2010

"Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial  
moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the  
moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact  
retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective  
significance (the making of history in the final instance)."  
--Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Silencing the Past"


For this special issue, we are soliciting columns that use media  
archives as sources and explore archives as objects of study in  
themselves. In particular, Flow seeks to problematize the rhetoric of  
"new," "digital," "ephemeral," and "interchangeable" with regard to  
our multifaceted media landscape and ask: In what very real ways do we  
form, practice, and extract from the archive? How does the archive  
function as a connection between the past and the present (and an  
example of the past's place in the present)? How does media function  
in the archive and as an archive? How can archival study be used to  
further public knowledge and historical consciousness? Which voices  
are filtered out, and which gain admission to the archive? What about  
the "unarchivable" -- affective, unwriteable, experiential?

In a sense, this special issue will itself be an archive: What is the  
current state of the mass-mediated past?

Some possible subjects include:

     * Social media as archive
     * Film preservation
     * DVR
     * The actor's, producer's and director's archive
     * Queer temporalities and media practices
     * Trauma, public memory, media
     * News gathering
     * The Internet as archive and archiving the Internet
     * DVDs as television archives
     * Mobile technology as archive
     * Reproducibility across media
     * TV networks as archives--TV Land/Nick at Nite, ESPN Classic,  
AMC, History channel
     * Popular media in national or official archives


Flow has a longstanding policy of encouraging non-jargony, highly  
readable pieces and ample incorporation of images and video. Please  
send submissions (attached as a Word doc) of between 1000-1500 words  
to [log in to unmask] no later than May 7, 2010. Images must be  
accompanied by a hyperlink to their original source on the web or  
other image credits.

FlowTV.org is the University of Texas at Austin, Department of  
Radio-TV-Film's journal of television and new media.

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu