Blog

The WCFTR blog highlights collection news, projects, and services with posts by staff, student assistants, and volunteers. We also cover WCFTR events and events with our campus partners.

Recent Posts

  • WCFTR, now on laserdisc!

    Matt St. John The audiovisual holdings at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research span numerous formats and sizes, from 16mm film prints to 2-inch videotapes, and we recently welcomed laserdiscs into the fold! …

  • Cover of Doron Galili's book "Seeing by Electricity"

    File under Telectroscope: Archives of Media in the Making

    The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research was honored to co-sponsor of the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference, held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. from April 27-30, 2023. One of the WCFTR’s co-sponsored sessions was a discussion with Dr. Doron Galili (a Research Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University) about his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878–1939 (Duke University Press, 2020). The discussion was moderated by Dr. Michele Hilmes, emeritus professor in the Communication Arts Department and a former director of the WCFTR, and also featured Dr. Susan Murray (BA, UW-Madison) and Dr. Philip Sewell (PhD, UW-Madison). We invited Dr. Galili to contribute to the WCFTR blog and expand on some of the reflections he shared at the conference about archives and broadcasting history.

  • A color scan of a newspaper article. There is a photo at the top of several WGA members during the 1988 strike. The article headline is "In Defense of the Writers." There are three columns of text.

    “In Defense of Writers” from the Alvin Boretz Collection

    Samantha Janes The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) is excited to share a piece from the ongoing digitization project of the Alvin Boretz collection. The Alvin Boretz collection came to the WCFTR …

  • Program Guide for the 2023 Radio Preservation Task Force Conference

    Broadcasting A/V Data at the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference

    Ben Pettis This past April, hundreds of researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners convened in Washington, DC for the 2023 conference of the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF). The RPTF is a group that promotes the curation …

  • WCFTR Receives NHPRC Grant for “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision” Project

    Matt St. John The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) has received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for a project titled “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision: …

  • The record attached to the pressbook for A Global Affair.

    An Unusual Discovery from A Global Affair

    Matt St. John We are excited to share that we’re continuing our efforts to scan our entire pressbook collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research! Keep an eye on the Media History …

  • Ken Kwapis cuts a large ribbon with a large pair of scissors

    Ken Kwapis Papers – Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony

    Andrew McDonnell Among the festivities that accompanied the Wisconsin Film Festival’s opening weekend, was the ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of WCFTR’s newest collections, the Ken Kwapis Papers. Kwapis is an accomplished film and television director …

  • WCFTR Receives NEH Grant to Digitize and Share Wendy Clarke’s Video Archive

    Ben Pettis The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) has received a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize, preserve, and publicly share the video archives of Wendy …

  • The Hartford Smith, Jr. Collection

    by Matt St. John The Hartford Smith, Jr. collection provides an audio record of Detroit in the 1960s through Seeds of Discontent, the 1968 radio series Smith created, wrote, and produced. Over 26 episodes, the …

  • Homepage of the Media History Digital Library

    Upgrading and Redesigning the Media History Digital Library

    For the past two years, the MHDL and WCFTR teams have been working to upgrade the online presence of the Media History Digital Library. While there have been incremental updates and band-aid fixes throughout the MHDL’s history, a dedicated modernization and redesign was long overdue. Thanks to the generous support of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an ACLS Digital Extension Grant, new versions of the MHDL website as well as the Lantern search platform were launched in late 2022.

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