Towards a participatory memory: multi-platform storytelling in historical television documentary

Abstract

This article explores strategies used by television programme makers in the multi-platform era, principally concerning personal memories of historical events. The availability and use of televisual materials has increased in the current ‘post-scarcity culture’, especially through the digitization of archival collections and production of history-based content for television. The author therefore considers the contemporary role of television in the active experience of (re-)engaging with past events in the present. The analysis focuses on a specific case of historical television documentary, the Dutch cross-media project In Europe, grounded in a textual analysis of the project and the creators' strategies of multi-platform storytelling. These strategies hold opportunities and implications for a specific kind of shared engagement with the past, which can arguably be called a ‘participatory memory’.