FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

In the contemporary landscape of news media, we encounter a realm where simulation and stereotypes pervade, shaping our perception of reality. Understanding the visual language of news media is crucial for unraveling how representations are meticulously crafted. It's posited that the visual narrative across various media platforms has become increasingly uniform, a trend significantly influenced by the reliance on stock shots. This practice has seen a noticeable uptick in the last two decades, paralleling the archival turn in media production. Rather than consistently sourcing new material, the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and digital advancements have led journalists to frequently repurpose stock shots for visual narratives in their reporting.

The ANR CROBORA project, in collaboration with prominent entities like Ina, Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana, and Mediaset, seeks to cast light on the repetitive and emblematic use of stock shots in audiovisual media. By amassing a collection of 35,000 stock footage reflecting European integration from two decades of French and Italian television broadcasts and selected web narratives, the project endeavors to analyze this corpus of mediatized visual memory. A sophisticated visualization platform and analytical tools have been developed to navigate this extensive and diverse dataset, addressing the challenges of collecting, organizing, annotating, and visualizing a large-scale and varied collection of audiovisual content.

This communication aims to delve deeper into the methodologies of data collection, annotation, and explorative analysis, leveraging both metadata and the audiovisual data itself. Through our data-driven approach, our research highlights the construction of collective imagination through the media's repetitive imagery, investigating how audiovisual production reinforces stereotypes, thereby influencing cultural dynamics and visual culture.