South Africa’s television history stretches back to 1976 when the verligtes
won over the verkramptes, allowing television into the highly controlled apartheid state for the first time. Television news broadcasts followed shortly thereafter. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is South Africa’s national broadcaster and largest TV news archiver in the country. Here, broadcasts from some of South Africa’s greatest and worst moments are kept in both digitised and analogue format – Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island, the first democratic election in 1994, footage from the FIFA 2010 World Cup, the Marikana Massacre. And yet the transcription, cataloguing, and dissemination of these broadcasts is highly problematic.
The SABC TV News Archives is in a state of disrepair due to continuous de-funding by government and political interference, yet the archive is rich in cultural and historical value. The archive deserves to be protected and catalogued correctly for future use, and the first step in doing this is to determine the practice of archiving at the Corporation. Since there is no standardised transcription procedure at the SABC, the aim of this project is to develop a needs-based method in order to improve practice. Objectives are three fold: firstly to evaluate and define, using action research, existing practices of transcription at national TV news archives; secondly to develop a standardised transcription method by compiling existing frameworks and theories of transcription (particularly multimodal discourse analysis) and test this method for human-transcribed multilingual use; and thirdly to deploy the method at the SABC by training archivists with the help of assistance from the South African government and International Federation of TV Archives (IFTA).
This project is in the initial “define” stage of the research and is a work in progress. This paper, designed for the Emerging Scholars Network and International Communication, presents early findings from evaluations of the SABC TV News archives as well as other leading archives. The sample of these archives are BBC Scotland, Getty Images, Vanderbilt TV News archives, the Internet Archive, the British Library, and the South African eNCA archive. The paper presents the theoretical and conceptual frameworks for this project, including multimodal discourse analysis, previous studies on TV news transcription, archivist procedures, and the SABC media/political environment. The paper then discusses future steps for the project and impacts of each step at the academic level (analysis, implementation) and also in policy (a standardised transcription procedure for TV news archives).