Recapturing temporal context in the digital archive: Easy-to-use methods for studying archived television

Jasmijn Van Gorp; Mary Joy van der Deure

doi:10.1177/17496020261428256

Recapturing temporal context in the digital archive: Easy-to-use methods for studying archived television

Jasmijn Van Gorp^*
, Mary Joy van der Deure

^*Corresponding author for this work

ICON - Media and Performance Studies

University of Amsterdam

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

When linear television enters the archive, its temporal context tends to become obscured. Based on Dutch TV news, we propose three easy-to-use methods for recapturing this context: visualizing repetitive imagery through screenshots; colour coding the relationship between archived broadcasts and broadcast schedules as printed in newspapers; and colour-coding segments in archival speech transcripts. Together, these methods show how archived television can be understood as the epitome of a ‘recombinatory practice’ (Uricchio, 2011), mixing flow, segmentation, and repetition with archival reordering, while also emphasizing the need for broader access to that same temporal context.

Original language	English
Journal	Critical Studies in Television
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/17496020261428256
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 21 Feb 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research has been conducted as part of the projects Re-Frame (Click-NL ppp programme and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) and NWO CLARIAH-PLUS (Grant 184.034.023).

Funders	Funder number
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek	184.034.023

Keywords

Digital archives
flow
methodology
television
TV news

Access to Document

10.1177/17496020261428256Licence: CC BY-NC

Cite this

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Recapturing temporal context in the digital archive: Easy-to-use methods for studying archived television

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

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