A wild-eyed television preacher, uncensored public access nuttiness, even a young Ellen DeGeneres featured on a 鈥� when had students explore the history of local television for a class, they sure found a lot of good stuff.
The students, about 40 in all, conducted this media scavenger hunt for a spring quarter class called Television History, taught by Groening, an assistant professor in the . Groening will teach the class again in spring of 2017.
And what the students found 鈥� through online searches and explorations of UW Libraries extensive Special Collections 鈥� will live beyond the classes in an online archive Groening has created called the .
The archive’s stated mission is to be an open-ended, publicly accessible research project “aimed at recovering, archiving and publicizing the local history of television in Seattle” and to serve as a site for original scholarship on the history of television.
That involves much more than just the old programs themselves. The archive is interested in press coverage of TV, television clubs and viewing parties as well as “the people of television 鈥� on-air talent, camera operators, producers, editors and interns 鈥� (who) all contribute to television culture and history.”
Items the students found are not just on the entertainment side, such as a or an exploration of the work of locals , they dug into serious local history as well.
Other exhibits in the growing archive are about:
- the as seen through Seattle TV
- media of the death of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain
- the experiences of the channel, and
- the broadcasting Seattle over the years
The Seattle Television History Project is supported with funding from the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media and the , enabling the archive to stream the contents of the exhibits and continue to add more exhibits as they come in.
Groening invites contributions to the archive. He also hopes to find funding for a subsequent project about the interconnections between local television and Seattle activism over the decades.
Beyond shows and the people who created or covered them, the archive also seeks to include the viewer experience.
Because we historically have watched TV privately in our homes, “the stories of television viewers have yet to be told,” notes from the site state. “Giving voice to specific viewer experiences is a crucial contribution to the history of media, cultural history and social history.”
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For more information, contact Groening at groening@uw.edu.