It was intriguing to read, on the BBC Radio 4 blog, of the effort & attention to detail that has gone into the effort to complete the web archive of Desert Island Discs. A level of commitment to get as close as possible to the original ‘as broadcast’ version that deserves the label ‘scholarly’ as much as does any collected works or definitive edition of printed material.
Which set me to pondering why ‘radio’ should not be a recognised subject of academic study, offered by our best universities, not just as part of the despised media studies. Surely radio is even more worth the attention of the brightest of minds as is the mere reading of novels? After all, film studies have achieved a degree of respectability, so the fact that radio is, relatively, such a new medium should not be a bar.
Maybe radio as we knew it was just a flash in the pan, a mere step on the way to a multi-media digital world. Maybe it has just been too diffuse, too popular to yield useful insights.
Or maybe it is just a tool; we still tend to think of literature as coterminous with books, but nobody atarted to study literature by studying the manufacture of paper, or earlier recording media. Nor from the study of printing itself.
But the value of the archive has, a little belatedly, been recognised & is receiving loving attention from engineers, conservators, cataloguers & digital preservation – not just as radio but, taking in all other formats, as an audio record which gives us much that mere hieroglyphs cannot. Linguists & phoneticians are itching to get their hands on this rich - & potentially huge – source of big data.
Perhaps these are necessary first steps – preservation, cataloguing, analysis, classification – in the business of defining & delineating this special medium, until it becomes fit for advanced study.
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