A Woman Who Recorded 70k Tapes of American News
wbur.org
wbur.org
When served well, verbatim transcriptions can make a fascinating or very emotional form of art. It's like this stuff, with all the stutterings, illogical sentences etc, is occasionally more directly "wired to my head", and thus closer to sensing the other person's "thinking", than a regular, careful literary composition. Then again, it is probably also easier to "overuse", I guess.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith
1: "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16071842-seven-american-...
2: "Soliloquy" -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/764257.Soliloquy?ac=1&fr...
It's like WW2 movies made in the 1950s. Actual GIs didn't talk like that.
The people buying and consuming the news are as guilty as the people making and selling it. The modern state of affairs exists by ambivalent forces present in any large population. It did not need to be engineered by any elite cabal, and it does not perpetuate merely because people are ignorant of what's in the archives.
sentiment, new use of words (ideas & technologies), the varying viewpoints for the same story, correlations between when something was first announced to later outcomes, etc.
From this it would be possible to show in a compelling way how the hearts and minds of the masses are shaped by the media they consume.
This is already well understood, and has been a conscious science since at least the turn of the century. See Edward Bernays, and Manufacturing Consent
I wonder what the outcome would be of such analysis, I bet it would be interesting!
An archive like this could offer incredible insight into the development of modern culture.
It would be a very valuable trove, I look forward to seeing the documentary about it.
"At the time Stokes began recording, television stations had been deleting archives for decades"
For-profit corporations can not be trusted to archive history.
Some companies do choose to keep archives:
https://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.45.3.l25...
* Former Library of Congress contractor here
It's not that they're exceptionally better at it. In fact, the Library has warehouses of materials that they still haven't cataloged, let alone organized or (better) digitized. Their primary focus has been the "sexy" projects like spool recordings, wax cylinders, etc that make for cool stories and mitigate decay (aka destruction) over modern material.
The big problem is that of collection. While in theory, anything that is a registered copyright in the US should be on file, most people don't take the time to register, let alone send off a copy.
The Library & National Archives aren't "better" at it.. it's that it's their primary purpose so the fact that they do it puts it above most other groups.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/summer/b...
Archiving used to be hoarding. It was phenominally expensive and in the end, nobody would make use the stuff.
But now we're entering the era of cheap inexhaustible storage, so the economics have changed.
And ironically, now corporations DO delete data due to pressure from lawyers (except for consumer data, which is valuable)
NASA lost a lot of their material on the Apollo missions.
Technically, doesn't the data exist as radiowaves traveling at lightspeed away from their broadcast source on earth?
Thank you Internet Archive!
It's a clean, well-done, fast site in general. Not something I expect from a radio station.
I don't listen to the radio in the car too often anymore, but it's never left 90.9 FM since I bought the car.
NPR has a serious in-house technology team.
In the end, he only digitized 100 of the tapes and says those 700 hours are “a tiny scratch into the surface of what's there.”"
Wow, what a treasure trove!
I think what Stokes did in recording those tapes was outstanding, by the way.
wtf.. stations delete their own footage? wouldn't you want to just hang on to everything indefinitely?
Maintaining archives isn't free and has very little expected future value in many cases, so, no, in a for-profit business you probably wouldn't want to.
In the 80s / 90s wouldn't a blank 3hr video be something like $5 or so (I'm guessing, as I recollect it was about £5 or so, and am expecting they'd be cheaper in the US as most things seemed to be then)
Given that 70k hrs would be around 23k 3hr cassettes, that would work out at maybe $115k. Seems a lot for an ex-Communist organiser to have ready to spend on a project like this (much as it has plenty of merit).
The movie trailer mentioned the multiple homes she owned, so she definitely had money. Being a Communist organizer shouldn't imply that someone lacks resources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....