The concept of ‘place-making’ emerged in media studies in 2015, but to date, there has been little theoretical engagement with the term. The primary research question this scoping review answers is how is ‘place-making’ defined across disciplines and which methodologies have been applied to creative and digital projects? A bibliometric analysis of 1974 publications from Web of Science (published in the last 30 years) were analysed to (1) define ‘place-making’ across disciplines, (2) model common themes in scholarship, (3) identify the methodologies used and (4) understand the impacts on citizens. The results show that ‘place-making’ first appeared in geography/urban studies in 1960s, was then adopted as ‘creative placemaking’ in the creative industries, and in the past 5 years (since 2015), it has appeared as ‘digital placemaking’ in media studies. It also highlighted areas (i.e. gaps) for future research into ‘creative placemaking’ and ‘digital place-making’ practices for cultural heritage sites.

Histories of events can be told from multiple perspectives, and there is rarely just one linear narrative or a single interpretation of the past. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to explain how the concept of shared authority in public history can be applied to transmedia storytelling, in the context of media studies, to address conflicting narratives on historical events. Transmedia narratives allow for more opportunities to target different audiences and offer alternatives, and perhaps conflicting interpretations, to official mainstream interpretations of historical events. This is achieved through three primary methods of public participation in the development of conflicting narratives which can be presented through a variety of different media. The theoretical challenges in sharing authority of transmedia narrative creation with different publics ranges from strong to little control (i.e. radical trust). Thus, we discuss a series of methodologies that can be strategically used in future research projects that wish to share authority with different publics in the development of historical transmedia narratives with conflicting interpretations. This approach can be particularly relevant in contexts of segregation, discrimination, identity, political changes or cultural wars.

Historical narratives seek to give us a shared reality, argued through recourse to evidence. Both impulses are under threat in the Age of the Anthropocene. This article introduces Live Interactive Documentary, a ‘performance dissemination’ model for history that deploys digital tools to merge cinema and lecture into a new form. It is designed to respond to Hayden White’s challenge in ‘The Burden of History’ and Bruno Latour’s call to gather as a bulwark to misinformation and the manipulative, political cooption of postmodern scepticism. Live Interactive Documentary creates a spectacle of archive and expertise, injected with post-postmodern values of polyphony and audience exchange, grounded in the local. This essay describes the form that I piloted with a team that includes historian Robert Nelson and composer, musician and media artist Brent Lee. Live Interactive Documentary is a model of ‘moving (image) history’ that seeks to cross boundaries between practice and theory, as well as history, film, multimedia performance art and participation. This hybrid cinema model draws upon theories of historiography, film and new media. It digitises earlier models of theatre and film exhibition and responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene by prioritising negotiation, complexity and gathering face-to-face in the real space of our analogue world.

Considering the impacts COVID-19 has had on travel and many economies, developing virtual experiences that are well-received by different publics has become even more prominent. This paper shows how a multimodal discourse analysis can be used to as a bottom-up approach to identifying narrative themes that can be used in virtual experiences for cultural heritage sites. A case study on 11 UNESCO World Heritage Australian Convict Sites shows how diverse sources of user-generated content, tourism marketing materials and historical information can be analysed and then remixed into a virtual tour of the sites in the form of an interactive web documentary (iDoc). Although this case study involved a total of seven narrative development phases, this paper focuses on two phases, namely how the user model and content model were determined. These models were later used to develop the resulting iDoc prototype. The user model focused on the prospective audience of cultural heritage tourists, and a content model of narrative themes for the iDoc was developed through a multimodal discourse analysis. This bottom-up approach of analysing existing cultural data allows for the discovery of the prospective audiences’ interests as well as narrative themes that can be included in virtual heritage experiences. It also provides a new creative methodology that can prevent issues that may arise with top-down narratives that focus too heavily on one institutional perspective or national narrative and lack direct engagement with or understanding of today’s publics.

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge).

With the emergence of computer games focused on the First World War, representations of the conflict have begun to reach brand new audiences in ways it has been unable to before. The portrayal of the war in an interactive setting has exposed millions to new information about its origins and methods. To understand the reach and impact of these games it is necessary to also understand their backgrounds and historiography. This article presents the first in-depth examination of the source material for two of the biggest First World War focused computer games in existence; Valiant Hearts: The Great War, and Battlefield 1. Through discussions with the developers behind these games and analysis of the sources which provided them with their information, it becomes possible not just to chart the provenance of their historical messages but also to understand how themes within academic history are being disseminated by the modern media. However, it is also possible to see the extent to which understandings of the war and how it was waged are not being incorporated by games developers or their products. This article argues that more work and cooperation is needed between historians and developers if the narratives of these games is to be influenced by historical research in the same way that the visual authenticity has been.

A seismic shift in the racial landscape of the United States occurred in 2016. The prevailing discourse about a “postracial America,” though always, in the words of Catherine Squires a “mystique,” was firmly and finally extinguished with the election of Donald J. Trump. Race, in the form of racial prejudice, erupted in Trump’s political rhetoric and in the rhetoric of his supporters. At the same time, the continued significance and consequences of racial division in America were also being asserted for politically progressive ends by the increasingly prominent #blacklivesmatter movement and by the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, DC, not far from the White House. This article tracks the resurgence of race in the US cultural landscape against the racially depoliticized myth of the “postracial” by focusing first on the HBO television series Westworld, which epitomizes that logic. The museum, which opened its doors against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, lodges a scathing critique of the very notion of the postracial; in fact, it signals the return of race as an urgent topic of national discussion. Part of the work of the museum is to materialize race, to move race and white supremacy to the center of the American national narrative. This article points to the way the museum creates what Jacques Rancière calls “dissensus,” and thus becomes a site of possibility for politics. The museum, in its very presence on the Mall, its provocative display strategies, and its narrative that highlights profound contradictions in the very meaning of America, intervenes in what Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible” and thus creates the conditions for reconfiguring the social order. In part, it achieves this by racializing white visitors, forcing them to feel their own race in uncomfortable ways. The article suggests that this museum, and the broader emerging discourse about race in both film and television, offers new ways to think about the political work of culture.

This article explores the role played by film sound in the audio-visual construction of historical dimensions of experience. This exploration does not treat the auditory level in isolation but considers how it interacts with moving images, montages, aesthetic and narrative concepts within the audio-visual histosphere.

Lincoln features several key moments in which the conventional, realist coordinates of the historical biopic open to a deeper sense of time and place, evoked in the film's references to clairvoyance, haunting, and ‘bad dreams’ – aspects of Lincoln's interior life that are well known but seldom expressed in film. The theme of haunting in Lincoln is rendered directly, but it is also suggested in the film's multiple references to the medium of photography, and in scenes that recall the flicker effect of early film. The film's complex understanding of time underlines the uncanny nature of the historical biopic, and the strange, almost phantasmatic wish at its core – the wish to impersonate and revivify the dead – a wish that is especially visible in films that take Abraham Lincoln as their subject.

Brian De Palma's Redacted stands out amongst the current crop of post-9/11 war films in that it contains an unambiguous critique of the Iraq War supported by an effective, visceral visual interpretation. To better understand Redacted's function and intentions within the canon of post-9/11 war cinema requires a comparison of the film to De Palma's previous war film, Casualties of War. De Palma endeavoured to provoke a similar debate on warfare in Redacted as he did with Casualties of War, as well as to provide a nearly identical commentary. Redacted, however, is very much a part of a search by post-9/11 film-makers for a meta-language sufficient to come to grips with actual combat experience. What becomes clear by comparison is that his earlier approach to characterization, narrative structure and visuals does not – and perhaps could not – have the same impact on public discourse after 9/11. I contend that Redacted, as well as other IraqWar films, are engaging with past modes of filmmaking – with the New Hollywood Vietnam film in particular – in order to challenge or rethink media representations of war. A textual analysis of Redacted alongside Casualties of War will demonstrate that although the two films share several striking characteristics – psychological doubling of characters, themes in support of an anti-war message and an intention to provoke debate – De Palma has revised the war film mode in Redacted in order to underline the incapacity of earlier war films to effectively convey combat experience. Therefore, Redacted should be viewed as a critique of the conventional Hollywood war film, and by extension as constituting a form of self-criticism towards the approach taken in Casualties of War.

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called "prosthetic memories" (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else's eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.

The period from 1918 to 1930 witnessed the emergence of documentary as a practice formally and semantically different from other “nonfictional” forms. At the same time, an “experimental” cinema also appeared, knowingly affiliated with the so-called historical avant-gardes. Since the term still persists in our era of digital postmodernism, we are entitled to examine the implications of this persistence in relation to the documentary image. For example, should we develop a multi-temporal approach to the histories and practices of cinema and documentary? A good starting point for exploring these implications is the work of Dziga Vertov, which questions the opposition between documentary and experimental cinema and which can be considered through Lev Manovich's theory of digital media and Frank Ankersit's concept of “sublime history”.