Research

With the maturation of newer trends in technology, education, culture, and television especially, there is a profound opportunity to develop and produce new types of valuable educational television projects. Digital technology has rendered the production and distribution of media less expensive, more able to be multi-purposed, more durable, and more portable, so that it can be watched and heard and read on almost every device with a screen or a speaker. University, high-school, and grade-school students and teachers have become accustomed to deploying video and audio assets in the classroom and in homework. Libraries and museums are moving to push parts of their holdings online and on-screen, often converting or even producing rich media to do so. And television producers and distributors are searching for what they call new models of broadcasting in the digital age.

With the generous support of Library and Archives Canada and JISC, Intelligent Television developed new models of “Open Production Initiatives” in association with cultural and educational institutions. The subject of one of these models—the Suez Canal crisis of 1956—drew upon many international collections of materials on the history of the 1956 invasion, the peacekeeping effort that followed, and the history of the Middle East and foreign involvement there.

This Open Production Initiative will make available as widely as possible new and old material produced and reformatted for the programs. The story is about 1) the foreign policies of a number of countries active in the Middle East; 2) a number of countries in the Middle East and the presence of foreign countries and foreign economic interests there; 3) a multilateral peacekeeping operation; and 4) how public interests and public and private media relate to one another in wartime. The collections of video, audio, books, newspapers, films, journals, documents, manuscripts, images, and online resources include those at the BBC Archive; the ITN Archive: the U.K. Public Records Office; the U.S. Library of Congress; the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; Library and Archives Canada; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Egypt’s Library of Alexandria; Israel’s Ben-Gurion Archives; and materials at other universities, archives, and research collections around the world.

For further information about Intelligent Television projects and productions, or to get involved, please contact the company.