Televising Information: Audiovisual Communication of Swedish Government Agencies

The purpose of this project is to study the aesthetic, narrative and rhetorical development of audiovisual public information on Swedish television. The focal point of the study is the public service broadcaster Sveriges Television’s bulletin program Anslagstavlan, which has been a unique audiovisual communication tool for Swedish government agencies since 1972. As large number of digitized audiovisual media become available on different platforms, there are today new ways to explore and understand the development of television narratives and aesthetics. Placed at the intersection of film studies, media history and digital humanities, this study takes a novel approach to Swedish television history by using digital video analytics tools to discover trends in government information over time. Televising Information will thus provide new knowledge about an influential yet underexplored genre of television, both from a national and an international point-of-view. As part of the project, I will spend one year at the The Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University and one year at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen.