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BBC Domesday: The Social Construction of Britain on Videodisc
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Macfarlane, Alan |
| Copyright Year | 1990 |
| Abstract | In the 1980's the two media, television and computing, for the first time to inscribe and store pictures in a new way. It aided by lasers, became unified into a new medium, interactive is now possible, on a disc the size of a gramophone record, to videodisc. Thisarticle willdescribe themostambitiousproject store up to 108,000 still, visual images. There are also two in this field up to the present, namely the two 'Domesday' ~cksavailabletostoresoundordigitallyencodedinformat~on. videodiscsmade by the BritishBroadcastingCorporation in the A littlemore than 300 megabytesof information (theequivalent years 1984-1986. This project used the latest techniques in of over one thousand normal floppy discs) can be held on each information retrievalanddatastorage tolay down,inelectronic of the two sides of thedisc. Put in the startling sales talk of the fonn,aportraitofBritishsociety in the 1980's. Theschemecost industry, this would mean that the text and illustrations of the several million pounds and involved more than a million Encyclopedia Britamica could be stored three times over on 'authors'. By examining from the inside how it was made, we one videodisc. It is estimated that the whole of the Library of can learn something about the potentials and limitations of a Congress, if stored in this form, would fit into a large sitting medium which,eitherin the form of videodiscorcompact disc, room. The medium will hold still photographs, moving films, islikely tobe themostimportanttechnologicaldevelopment for graphics, texts, statistics and sound recordings. visual anthropology of the next few years. Thislargequantity of material would bevirtually unusable without a second development, namely in computing. There Precedents have been hardware advances which have led to a range of cheap and powerful micro-computers which can be linked to Nine hundred years ago the Domesday Survey attempted the videodisc. These are made particularly useful by the new to describe in two volumes the landholding system of most of information retrieval systems which have emerged from work England. It is nearly allconceroed with property relations. The on database systems and artificial intelligence The Domesday present survey by the British Broadcasting Corporation is not Discs make available to a much wider public a combined limited to what would now beclassified as one section of "The system which has the storage and searching power of a large Economy'. TheBBC hasattempted tocoveramuch widerarea, mainframe computer, but are filled with data which no convenincluding the Environment, Society and Culture. Perhaps the tional computer could hold, sound and pictures, as well as closestprecedent, which combined visualand textual materials statistics and texts. and attempted to give a portrait of a society, was a series of Thatwearestepping away fromprevious mediaisindicated beautifully illustrated books produced by Collins in the 1940s. by attempts to speculate on what a videodisc really is. Peter collectively known as 'Britain in Pictures'. Yet this series, as Armstrong, theinspirationandgeneraleditorof theBBCDiscs, well as other anticipations, such as Tom Harrison's 'Mas goesthroughthepossibilities. 1tisasonofelectronicbook.and Observation' project, only provide weak precedents for the yet it is not really a book because one has random access to it. BBC Domesday Videodisc Project. We might add that it is also different from a book both in scale and because the link to a microcomputer makes it possible to A New Medium and a New Message manipulatedatainanew way. Aninteractivebookisanewkind of book. Is it then an encyclopedia? Up to a point, but not It is conventional when describing videodisc to single out entirely because it is not split into fixed 'articles', nor is it its central feature as the marriage in the early 1980s of two attemptingencyclopediccoverage. Isitadatabasewithpictures technologies. On the one side the development of television, and sound? It is indeed this, but this makes it different from all combined with advances in laser techniques, made it possible previous computerized databases. Armstrong argues that it is |
| Starting Page | 25 |
| Ending Page | 41 |
| Page Count | 17 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1525/var.1990.6.2.25 |
| Volume Number | 6 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/BBC%20Domesday.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1990.6.2.25 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
