Welcome back to our posts to this space!

We have been busy realizing the initiatives that arose in our symposium at Dartmouth College last May.  We have contributed to several major developments in the busy world of media archives, developments which will be highlighted in upcoming posts on this site.

Here is a brief update about the core focus of our recent activities:

The notion of ecology is central to the project in several ways. Those of us who work on media history recognize that the materiality of historical media is fated. These historic media texts simply will not endure, but for the efforts to preserve and archive them.

In a fundamental sense this is a sustainability project: we are working to protect and ensure cultural memory in the form of historical media collections.

We have set out to connect media scholars with the historical archives they use in their academic work. We intend that the scholarship realized via MEP will support the essential work of media archives.

The specific platforms we have engaged and are working to bridge are 1) Mediathread, a classroom platform developed at Columbia University, that we are working to augment as a research platform; 2) Scalar, a digital publishing platform developed at The University of Southern California; and 3) onomy.org, a new online tool developed for MEP that will facilitate the creation of glossaries  and controlled vocabularies that can be assigned to online media files.

The Media Ecology Project sits in between and in relation to these platforms and the participating archives, navigating the import, export, and production of metadata across archival content that has been engaged by a scholar or team of scholars. In this way we will expand the capacities for search and discovery within specific archives and in relation to other archives, in order to realize new forms of research, scholarship, and publication.