De/Contextualizing Information: The Digitization of Video Editing Practices at the BBC

Abstract

The pervasive diffusion of digital media has introduced profound changes to social practices, challenging established notions of embeddedness and context. Based on our case study on the BBC's Digital Media Initiative, we further explore these changes in the domain of video craft editing for television broadcast brought about by the digitization of the video production process. As craft editing is mediated by digital images, its contextual embeddedness is transformed by context-independent standards of computation and metadata resulting in the erosion of the contextual boundaries of the practice. Given our findings, we argue that in the digital domain, the embeddedness of practices needs to be reconsidered in favor of concepts that account for the peculiarities of digitality and its unprecedented degree of context autonomy.

Keywords:

• context
• digital video
• embeddedness
• information
• media semiotics
• practices

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Mervyn Middleby, Head of Technology and Operations at BBC NI, as well as his team members, who provided all the necessary resources and support in granting us access to information at the BBC's DMI. Our findings are of course ours, and none of the persons we interviewed in the course of our investigation are responsible for the way we construct and interpret the relevant processes at BBC. We also thank the editors, Bonnie Nardi, Hamid Ekbia, and Jannis Kallinikos, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their support and constructive feedback.

Notes

1. A similar argument can be made in terms of the digitization of music or, to be more precise, its notation scheme, which we do not have space to elaborate on in this article (cf. Kallinikos 2002).

2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, accessed August 12, 2014.

3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/creativearchive, accessed November 30, 2011. The site has been taken offline.

4. Long-form productions are defined as video products of long running times (usually no less than 30 minutes) that take the form of a drama, series, TV show, documentary, or film. Long-form productions take several days, months, or even years to produce and involve practitioners from the entire range of video production.

5. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036r5cx, accessed February 7, 2014.