Participants Wanted: Untold Visions STEP Project
Untold Visions: Researching, Classifying and presenting hidden gems of film history from the Scottish Moving Image Archive
Some undergraduate places are still open on this Summer Teams Enterprise Programme (STEP) research project on the history of moving images in Scotland!
We are looking for keen students interested in working with archives and discovering people, places, and stories about Scottish Cinema. The project will help you build skills of research and presentation. More importantly, it will give you a chance to create materials useful for future historians!
The project is open to all, but would be especially attractive to students from Art History, History, Film Studies, International Relations, Museum Studies and those interested in archival research and primary historical research.
Deadline to apply: 15th of May 2023
For more information about STEP and to apply Apply at: STEP Website
Project description:
The Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland houses treasure troves of history about the country, its people, and the surroundings. Along with the films, the archive contains extensive paper documentation – film programmes, production notes, publicity material etc. – that help us learn about the varied cinema practices and cinema cultures here. This project will require the students to pick one selection of written archives, in consultation with the Moving Image Library, come with a catalogue or classification system for the collection, and based on a presentation format of their choosing, highlight key areas of interests that they feel are (as yet) under-explored. The classification will be based not only on recurring trends in the material that the students notice, but also their idea of what bits of history within these archives need to be foregrounded. In addition to studying the collection itself, students will require to conduct other bits of archival research – newspaper and journal searches, viewing historical footage etc. – that would add greater context to the specific archival collection.
Project outputs:
The students need to come up with an updated classification for the archival collection. Are there recurring regions/cultural references/people that pop-up in the discussions. Are there less explored roles in film production that need to be highlighted? Essentially the students need to think what a future historian would find useful when accessing the collection via this classification. In addition, the students need to choose a presentation format – lecture, research poster, a small museum exhibit etc. that highlight key areas of interest that they discovered during the research. Finally, a short report would need to be put together, highlighting what was the research process, and some suggestions for where one might look for further research.