Despite being among the most expensive and time-consuming items that records
professionals deal with, audio-visual archives remain under-appreciated and
underused by historians. The legacy of difficult-to-access screen material has
combined with a long-standing reluctance to deal with AV as complex texts,
meaning that documents continue to dominate in historical work. Film, video,
broadcast television and the cinematic screen have nonetheless been indispensable
in the biological, medical and social sciences for training, promoting and debating
on issues of the body and mind in the twentieth century. But although time-based
screen media are unmatched in their facility to simultaneously convey complex
intersections of the corporeal, the psychological, and the practical, the value of
historic AV for empirical work is only just beginning to garner serious and
committed attention.
BodyCapital - an ERC - funded research project specialising in the use of AV
material as a primary source for investigating the history of health, health
concepts and healthcare – has thereby convened a knowledge exchange between
archivists working in the fields of science and medicine, and researchers from the
project. During this mini-conference, archivist participants and BodyCapital
researchers/historians will share their experiences and observations of working
with science and medicine-oriented AV. The principal aim is to identify common
ground between academic researchers and archivists working in the fields of
history of health, medicine and science (broadly defined) in order to pinpoint
areas for future research collaboration, and in consideration of where new
audiences for the health/medicine/science AV archive might be developed. Core
research questions will be; what is the research value of the medico-scientific AV
archive? Where and why should AV archive be utilised as an object of
investigation? What are the pitfalls and benefits of working with AV material
(within the specific remit of the BodyCapital themes, and in also in the practical
undertaking of further research)? These topics will be addressed through the direct
screening and discussion of AV archive, as selected by participants. By allowing
for the free discussion of AV objects of interest, it is hoped that this event will
provide both archivists and researchers alike a rare opportunity to debate within a
research forum outside of their usual, respective remits.
This conference is not open to the public. For any further information, please contact Jessica Borge.
