NarDis: Narrativizing Disruptive Media Events with the Media Suite’s Exploratory Search Tools

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Sabrina Sauer and Berber Hagedoorn
NarDis: Narrativizing Disruptive Media Events with the
Media Suite’s Exploratory Search Tools
Abstract
Our CLARIAH research pilot ‘Narrativizing Disruption’ (NarDis) investigates how (digital) humanities researchers
who use audio-visual materials in their research practices can benet from digital tools that help them better
understand how media representations construct meaning. This research pilot uses a case study approach to delve
deeper into the relationship between scholarly search and storytelling – by concentrating on how, specically,
the Media Suite’s exploratory search tools can help to understand how ‘disruptive’ media events are constructed
as narratives across media, and instilled with specic cultural-political meanings. This article presents the
methodological insights of the research pilot, in order to explain how the existing features and functionalities of
the Media Suite – specically, its exploratory search tools – support such explorations. We discuss the challenges
that we encountered during our research pilot, and identify a number of opportunities and recommendations for
further Media Suite development.
Keywords
narrative creation, storytelling, media research, user studies, archives, linked open data
Introduction
CLARIAH’s ‘Narrativizing Disruption’ (NarDis) research pilot investigates how (digital) humanities
researchers who use audio-visual materials in their research practices can benet from digital tools that
help them better understand how media representations construct meaning. The project’s premise is
that media researchers who analyse audio-visual materials and mediated events often reconstruct
narratives, and are therefore storytellers themselves.1 The pilot delves deeper into the relationship
between scholarly search and storytelling – by concentrating on how, specically, the Media Suite’s
exploratory search tools can help to understand how ‘disruptive’ media events are constructed as
narratives across media, and instilled with specic cultural-political meanings. Disruptive media events

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are by denition unexpected; these events are shocking and often unexpected, such as natural
disasters or terrorist attacks.2 Disruptive events are difcult to narrativise due to their haphazard
unfolding, with reporting often taking place across different media platforms simultaneously.
Researchers aiming to analyse the representation of disruptive events would thus benet from tools
that offer explorations of different perspectives on such events.3
The project uses a case study approach in order to understand how exploratory search and narrative
formation relate by investigating how exploratory search tools can support media researchers’ interpretations
of ‘disruptive’ media events as narratives.4 To make this more concrete, NarDis investigates media researchers’
use of exploratory search tools and narrative formation around two specic disruptive events, namely the
case studies of (1) the assassination of Dutch politician Fortuyn in 2002 and (2) the North Sea Flood of 1953.
This project approaches this question by testing the Media Suite’s (exploratory) search tools, namely
the Comparative Search recipe and the Explore recipe (DIVE+) (described below), and examines how media
researchers use and create narratives to understand disruptive media events. In the Media Suite, the term
‘recipe’ refers to each of the tools that researchers can use to engage with the collections that are
accessible through the Media Suite.5 Exploratory search ‘describes an information-seeking problem
context that is open-ended, persistent, and multifaceted, and information-seeking processes that are
opportunistic, iterative, and multitactical.’6 In other words, this type of searching is about exploring search
results when the person who is browsing is investigating a topic without a clearly formulated research
question. Indeed, exploring a topic could support the development of a research question. Exploratory
search tools therefore aim to support complex problem solving by aligning search tools with more iterative
(human) processes of learning. Instead of providing direct information retrieval, exploratory search tools
support human curiosity, creativity and experienced serendipity, by offering search results that are
indirectly related to a search query (e.g. not presenting a direct answer to the query ‘date Fortuyn
assassination’, but for instance offering search results about what else happened on that date).
The principal investigators (Sabrina Sauer and Berber Hagedoorn) focused on two specic
Media Suite recipes in this research project. First, the linked-data digital cultural collection browser
DIVE+– the Explore recipe – is a recipe that ‘provides access to heritage objects from heterogeneous
collections, using historical events and narratives as context for searching, browsing and presenting
the objects’.7 This recipe is based on linked data and the linked data model, which connects data from
collections thatare otherwise not readily connected in one searchable interface. What makes the
linked data model so interesting is that it allows users to explore connections between, for example,

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objects in digital heritage collections that would not seem to be connected, but that are related (based
on semantic similarities between their metadata descriptions and collection descriptions and
thesauruses). The Explore recipe’s data is constantly enriched via crowdsourcing and other user
contributions, and offers a highly dynamic and visually rich interface. At the time of the research pilot
(4 December, 2017), DIVE+8 or the Explore recipe contained 1,106,844 entities, from Delpher (KB), the
Amsterdam Museum, Tropenmuseum and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Open
Images collection).
Second, the Media Suite’s Comparative Search recipe is a tool for exploring radio and
television programme descriptions, television subtitles and historical newspaper articles. The
tool affords searches across the audio-visual collection of the Netherlands Institute for Sound
and Vision (NISV) and a selection of newspapers of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, Royal
Libraryof the Netherlands). Comparative Search (based on the previously developed tool
AVResearcherXL) allows for ‘distant-reading’ exploration of collections, based on word
frequencies appearing in the archival descriptive metadata and/or within the documents’
content(for instance subtitles or speech transcripts, when available). It is used for research into
representation and discourses.9
In this brief project overview, we provide details of our methodology – how we used these Media
Suite recipes for our research – in order to explain how the existing features and functionalities of
these recipes supported this research. We do so to make explicit which challenges we encountered
during the research pilot, and to identify a number of opportunities for further Media Suite
development, especially for the Explore recipe.
Methodology and corpus selection
NarDis combined two methods to reach its research insights. First, the investigators dened their
general exploratory research process of a disruptive event, such as the Fortuyn assassination,
intogeneralised steps: explore contextual information about the event across archives such as
Delpher, Google Scholar, YouTube, academic databases, the NISV’s audio-visual collection
(usingfaceted search to sort results by name, date, eye-witnesses, assassin, genre of media, and
bybroadcaster) and by visiting archives physically. After collecting materials, ideas about the
eventwould be rened, analysed, and written up.10

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In an ideal use case, the Media Suite tools support this process by aiding with:
1. Archive selection for research purposes; by giving researchers an overview of digitally
searchable archives and providing one point of access to these different archives,researchers
can save time and spend less time perusing different archivesand interface.
2. Decision making about collection selection to search, which has ramications: are
collectionsphysically or virtually accessible, and in what material form (physical format,
digitised, or digital)?
• Collections that are accessible in the Media Suite are investigated with the Collection
Inspector, which provides statistics about how complete the metadata elds are in a
particular collection. This helps researchers identify which collections could be useful
to explore. Multi-layered single collection search – a tool to help specify how certain
topics, genres or time periods are represented in the collection – is used with the NISV
collection.
3. Searching in collections for the title of the event (e.g. ‘Assassination of Pim Fortuyn’) or
implicated persons.
• The rst search step entails looking for the main media outlets (e.g. NOS news about
Fortuyn’s assassination, newspapers, and rst-person accounts as close to the event in
time as possible, e.g. 6 May 2002)
• The second step involves looking for discussions of the event in the media
(e.g.political talk shows, more distant to the event than directly after: this
way,discourses surrounding the event are collected for analysis)
4. Corpus analysis by supporting – for instance – discourse analysis: what narratives can be
discernedabout the event? Ideally, Exploratory Search and Comparative Search offer support
for analysis by displaying materials in such a way that the timeline of the event becomes
clearer, or suggest central media objects such as eye-witness accounts, or news reports about
the event. This could aid researchers in analysing narratives about disruptiveevents.
5. Serendipitous insight generation: ideally, the above steps leave room for researchers to
discover unexpected insights, new narratives and discourses. For example, whenunexpected
media objects are presented (such as radio broadcasts) that mentionFortuyn’s assassination
in a different context (e.g. when discussing disastertourism: people visiting the site of his
assassination). Discovering a multitudeofnarratives around the event can grant insight in
the multi-interpretability ofpast events.
This rst method was combined with a second approach. As a second method, the
principalinvestigators organised nine user sessions in which (digital) humanities researcherswere
invited to explore disruptive events with the Media Suite’s Explore recipe, inorder to gain more
user perspectives and validate research insights. During these sessions,users were presented with a

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search task (see Figure 1), created posters about their exploratory search processes, and discussed
– in a focus group session – their use of the recipe. Combined, these user perspectives led us to
insights into corpus selection and usability of the Media Suite.
Figure 1. Exploratory Search task, user session 17 May, 2017.
Using the Explore and Comparative Search recipes: Insights on corpus selection and
usability
The Explore recipe: browse and explore
Our pilot research into the benets and challenges of using the Explore recipe indicates that the
recipe allows limited exploration of narratives around disruptive media events. In this section, we
discuss the benets and challenges of using this recipe as part of our research methodology. Upon
accessing the Explore recipe, users are presented with featured example searches, and the following
categories that can be used to search entities: media object, actor, event, place, and concept.11 The
single search box invites users to start exploring, and suggests search terms by showing users a
number of popular search queries.

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A clear limitation of the Explore recipe is its limited corpus; while many different collections are
accessible via the recipe, these collections do not provide data about Fortuyn’s assassination. Interpreting
this particular disruptive event was therefore impossible. Due to technical challenges in making more
collections accessible as linked data, the collections that are currently available in the Explore recipe do
not include the entire NISV collection. Searching for ‘Pim Fortuyn’, or ‘aanslag’ (assault), or ‘moordaanslag’
(murder), or ‘Media Park’ (the location of Fortuyn’s assassination) yielded no results. Therefore, one of the
recommendations of our research pilot is to clarify which collections can be explored within the recipe, for
instance in a tutorial or an information box. As there was no relevant material available, the researchers
decided to explore alternative Media Suite recipes (the Comparative Search recipe), while simultaneously
further investigating alternative disruptive events using the Explore recipe.
The North Sea Flood (‘Watersnoodramp’) of 1953 proved to be a more fruitful event to
investigate with the Explore recipe. This query generated 7 events and 61 objects. However, it was
unclear why search results are labelled as events or objects; radio bulletin transcripts could contain
information about events, and be included as an object as well. Instead of supporting exploration, this
experienced randomness of search result labelling confused researchers taking part in the pilot user
study: researchers do not necessarily share the developers’ idea about what constitutes an object or
event. This confusion could make the recipe less useful to researchers.
Assessing how search queries and search results match also proved challenging. Search result
thumbnails (which show a small image of a search result) indicate what an object is (for example a
news item, with a tag stating: ‘matches search query’), but do not indicate how the object and query
match exactly. It would be helpful to show excerpts of text mentioning the exact search query when
the user hovers over the thumbnail. This way, it would become possible to assess how search queries
match search results.
Deeper exploration of collections using the Exploration path
One of the elements of the Explore recipe that would support narrative formation around disruptive
events, is the recipe’s exploration pane (Figure 2). The exploration pane gives an overview of those
search results that users have bookmarked as they explore. As these bookmarked search results are
presented as a search pathway, or history, these results form a kind of ‘search narrative’ (Figure 2).
One of the pilot’s recommendations was to allow users to annotate these ‘search narratives’. That
way, users can describe connections between search results in order transform a ‘search narrative’,

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into an ‘event narrative’ (Figure 3); annotating how results connects and facilitate the interpretation
of what kind of discourse about the event is constructed in each search result. Such annotation within
the Explore recipe interface allows for interpretation within the recipe’s interface.
Figures 3a and 3b. Recommendations to incrementally adapt the Explore recipe on the level of audio-visual
annotation by the user (in grey).
Figure 2. DIVE+ Exploration path for the query ‘Watersnoodramp’ (North Sea Flood).

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Comparative search
Upon entering the Comparative Search recipe of the Media Suite, users can query and compare particular
collections. In the case study of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the researchers searched for the key words
‘Pim Fortuyn’ and ‘moord’ (‘murder’). Figure 4 shows the result of this query. The Comparative Search recipe
makes it immediately clear to the researchers that the collection of the NISV contains material about this
case that ts the chronology of the assassination. In other words, the recipe allows the researchers to explore
whether or not a collection contains materials to further investigate. It would be useful if, after having
inspected this collection, the materials within this collection could be selected for further investigation
using tools such as the Explore recipe. This alternative exploration of collections could trigger insights; the
Explore recipe could for instance allow researchers to ‘zoom in’ on collections by looking at how different
entities within the collections (such as people and objects) relate across the selected collections.
Figure 4. Comparative Search for ‘Pim Fortuyn’ and ‘murder’ using Comparative Search recipe.

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Final reection: Challenges and opportunities of the Media Suite’s Exploratory Search
recipes
The Comparative Search and Explore recipes posed certain challenges to the NarDis research pilot,
particularly in terms of tool functionality and the collection accessibility. The user sessions that were
organised further support these challenges.
The Comparative Search recipe provides a good indication of whether or not materials about a
topic, or in our case person, can be found in selected collections. This suggests that as part of a
research method, researchers could use this recipe as a rst step in their Media Suite exploration
process. However, access to collections is not immediately evident as it is not possible to access
collections directly from the Comparative Search recipe interface. It would be useful if users could
select collections and access them in a tool such as the Explore recipe. That way, the latter recipe
could be used to ‘zoom in’ on collections found using the Comparative Search recipe.
It is crucial to make more (complete) collections available as linked (open) data in the Explore
recipe if this tool is to be used more extensively. For instance, to understand how disruptive events
are represented in media, it would be useful to include newspaper articles, news programs in video,
more transcripts of radio bulletins, current events talk shows, and tv guides to indicate how a
disruptive event intervened in the programmed broadcasting ow. Apart from issues with collection
accessibility, the user tasks and focus group sessions in our user study identied problems with users’
understanding of how the Explore recipe creates connections between search results. More
transparency about how linked (open) data creates connections will help users more readily embrace
the type of exploratory search supported by the recipe. Currently, this lack of transparency made
researchers question how the tool shapes event representation; if one does not know what is missing,
or how search results relate, it becomes impossible to contextualise what is presented by the recipe.
This also threatens the recipe’s perceived usefulness as part of a scientic methodology.
A recommendation resulting from the pilot was to allow users to export the Explore recipe’s
exploration paths into a user’s personal research space. The fact that this recommendation was
implemented by the end of the pilot means that researchers will now be able to compare saved
exploration paths, to start comparing different search and event narratives around disruptive events
in one interface. Provided that more complete collections become available in the Media Suite, this
could expedite research processes.

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Overall, the pilot results show that analysing how the Media Suite’s search recipes facilitate
research into narratives around disruptive events is no easy task; one disruptive event, the Fortuyn
assassination, had to be abandoned due to a lack of accessible material. Access to collections across
the different (search) recipes of the Media Suite is clearly crucial. Ideally, having more access to
collections across the different tools of the Media Suite allows researchers to more fully understand
how tools shape interpretation, which is not only key for the humanities as a eld, but also for
researchers who want to investigate how narratives are shaped across audio-visual media.
Notes
1. For an in-depth discussion of our research on digital tools’ socio-technical affordances in supporting
narrative creation (research, writing, story composition) by both media researchers and professionals working
with crossmedia and audio-visual sources, see our project website at https://www.clariah.nl/nl/projecten/
nardis-narrativizing-disruption, and: B. Hagedoorn and S. Sauer, “The Researcher as Storyteller: Using Digital
Tools for Search and Storytelling with Audio-Visual Materials,” VIEW Journal of European Television History
and Culture 7, no. 14 (2018):150–70. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18146/2213-0969.2018.jethc159.
2. Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz, Media Events in a Global Age (London: Routledge, 2010);
Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, “‘No More Peace!’: How Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events,”
International Journal of Communication 1 (2007): 157-166; Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live
Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); César Jiménez-Martínez, “Integrative
Disruption: The Rescue of the 33 Chilean Miners as a Live Media Event,” in: Global Perspectives on Media
Events in Contemporary Society, ed. Andrew Fox (London: IGI Publishers, 2016), 60-77.
3. See also B. Hagedoorn, “‘It’s Like the Space Shuttle Blows Up Every Day’: Digital Television Heritage as
Memory of European Crises in the Age of Information Overload,” Journal of European Studies 49, no 3-4
(2019): 427-447. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0047244119859169.
4. Our exploratory critique of digital tools’ socio-technical affordances in terms of support for narrative creation
by media researchers was rst published in: Hagedoorn and Sauer, “The Researcher as Storyteller”.
5. Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Roeland Ordelman, Marijn Koolen, Julia Noordegraaf, Liliana Melgar, Lora Aroyo,
JaapBlom, Victor de Boer, Willem Melder, Jasmijn van Gorp, Eva Baaren, Kaspar Beelen, Norah Karrouche,
Oana Inel, Rosita Kiewik, Themis Karavellas and Thomas Poell, “From Tools to ‘Recipes’: Building a Media
Suite within the Dutch Digital Humanities Infrastructure CLARIAH.” Paper presented at Digital Humanities
Benelux Conference, Utrecht, 2017.

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6. Ryen W. White and Resa A. Roth, “Exploratory Search: Beyond the Query-Response Paradigm,” in: Synthesis
Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services #3, ed. Gary Marchionini (Chapel Hill: Morgan &
Claypool Publishers, 2009), vi.
7. V. de Boer, J. Oomen, O.A. Inel, L.M. Aroyo, E. van Staveren, W. Helmich and D. de Beurs, “DIVE into the
Event-Based Browsing of Linked Historical Media. Journal of Web Semantics,” 35, no. 3 (2015): 152-158.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2015.06.003.
8. DIVE+ is a research project funded by the NLeSC and is a collaborative effort of Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam (Lora Aroyo, Victor de Boer, Oana Inel, Chiel van den Akker, Susan Legêne), Netherlands
Institute for Sound and Vision (Jaap Blom, Liliana Melgar, Johan Oomen), Frontwise (Werner Helmich),
University of Groningen (Berber Hagedoorn, Sabrina Sauer) and the Netherlands eScience Centre (Carlos
Martinez Ortiz). It is also supported by CLARIAH and NWO. It was the winning submission of the LODLAM
Challenge 2017 Grand Prize (International Summit for Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and
Museums) in recognition of how DIVE+ demonstrates social, cultural and technical impact of Linked Data.
See: Hagedoorn and Sauer, “The Researcher as Storyteller”.
9. https://mediasuite.clariah.nl/documentation/glossary/avresearcher.
10. For our discussion of the process of the research journey, which follows, in an iterative fashion, the steps of
Explore – Rene – Analyse – Tool Criticism – Write – Disseminate; see: Hagedoorn and Sauer, “The
Researcher as Storyteller”.
11. In Media Suite version 4, the Explore recipe categories have been changed to media objects, people,
locations, and concepts.
Biographies
Sabrina Sauer is Assistant Professor Media Studies at the University of Groningen. She has a
background in Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies, and trained as an actor prior to
writing her dissertation about living laboratories and user-technology improvisations as a source
forICT innovation, at the University of Twente.
Berber Hagedoorn is Assistant Professor Media Studies & Audiovisual Culture at the University of
Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research interests revolve around screen cultures
(representations and crossmedia storytelling practices) and audio-visual cultural memory in
Europe.

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TMG Journal for Media History
Volume 24 No (1/2)/2021
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.18146/tmg.812
PUBLISHER
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
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