Retelling the Past with Broadcast Archives: Context Makes Sense

The publication of audiovisual archives asks many questions about the meaning of documents. Publishing a video archive on a Web site, for example, is a re-contextualisation. The loss of cultural references needed to understand a document implies the necessity to recontextualise documents. This means adding elements, such as titles, descriptions and other information. This paper analyzes the case of a video published by Ina on its Web platform Ina.fr and its Blog, the Blognote. The video, dated 1st January 1947, is a report envisioning a future when surveillance cameras would be installed on the streets in Paris. These two instances of publication offer two different views on the editorialization of video archives.