posted on 2017-11-27, 17:20authored bySteven Henderson
As a practice, archiving preserves and protects information that would otherwise be lost,
offering important resources to researchers to interpret, chart and define what the archives
represent, allowing the public to reflect on records held within them. Archiving is open to
many disciplines, organisations and institutions with distinctions made in the care and
organisation of records maintained under these disciplines.
In terms of animation, archiving finished films on various formats is an established practice,
and researchers interpret those films within their own research, but the animation production
materials, used in the creation of the films are not privy to an established form of archival
practice. Whilst these archives – or collections of materials do exist, they are archived without
any unified, peer reviewed specialist interpretation of the care and organisation of the
collections using a taxonomy that reflects the unique aspects of animation production. There
is a clear need to establish the archiving of animation production materials as a distinct
practice with its own taxonomy and philosophy. Examining the current practices from other
forms of archiving that are applied to animation production collections and developing a
distinct model of practice from these models can achieve this. Once archiving animation
materials is an established practice and data is managed in a way that reflects the
acknowledges the distinctive aspects of animation as a form, data and records created from
the collections can then be used as empirical evidence to enhance the study of animation.
This thesis begins that work by developing and applying a model of practice, using a
collection of previously uncatalogued materials to explore the possible ways in which an
animation production archive would best be used as primary research material. The collection
is used to conduct an investigation into British children’s television animation. As a form,
animation is often neglected and often lost in semantics as a children’s genre and within that
neglect is a disregard even within the study of children’s programming itself, a body which
would claim to take children’s televisual content seriously. Even bodies such as the Office of
Communications (Ofcom) and the British Audience Research Board (BARB) have no
definition of what an animated television show for children is, and yet continues to provide
data with this absent definition present in their research.
By using a collection of animation materials to create a taxonomy and studying the records
created whilst using this taxonomy it is possible to define the form of children’s television
animation and in doing so prove the use of a collection of animation materials as a model of
research and the practice of animation archiving as worthy of its own district identity,
philosophy and practice which can continue to be developed for all types of animation.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2017
Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at Loughborough University.