Digitize This: Public Broadcasting and the Montreal Radio Drama Project (1930–1969)

Abstract

This article makes the case for digitalizing archives related to broadcasting history and speculates on the advantage the creation of a future online archive would have for access and multidisciplinary research. It describes a set of Montreal radio dramas and situates them in the larger paper archive containing Canadian English Language Radio Drama produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and predecessors between 1931 and 1968. It also provides a sociological description of the centralization process that occurred in the history of Canadian literary production and the cultural norms that are assumed to be “natural” when regional and urban cultural producers prepare dramatic creations for a national audience.

Notes

¹One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, A Report on the Experiences of First Respondents to the Digging Into Data Challenge by Christa Williford and Charles Henry Research Design by Amy Friedlander June 2012. ISBN 978-1-932326-40-6 CLIR pub151. Various software available: Zotero, Voyeur/Voyant Tools, Mathematica, Improvise, Electronic Enlightenment Correspondence Visualization Tool, Gamera document analysis framework.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greg M. Nielsen

Greg M. Nielsen (Ph.D., Université de Montreal, 1984) is a professor of sociology at Concordia University, Montréal and director of the Concordia Center for Broadcasting Studies. His current research concerns an interdisciplinary approach to the comparative study of controversies in mediated urban citizenship and more specifically in dialogic framing analyses of newspapers and studies of citizenship as portrayed across the journalistic field.

Mircea Mandache

Mircea Mandache (M.A., Concordia University, 2002) is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Université de Montréal and research administrator at the Concordia Center for Broadcasting Studies.