Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Film/TV history Media Archaeology Project

• Requires students to focus on the process of research rather than trying to fudge the product (which is the risk with research essays, especially in the era of gen AI).
• Introduces students to a historical research method.
• Requires students to learn how to navigate databases; problem solve; build connections to course content, locate, present, annotate, evaluate, and contextualise sources; as well as reflect on process.
• Limits opportunities for AI use because it is centred on presentation of authentic primary evidence (digitized sources in online archives). students who try using Large Language Models (LLMs) for all of it, cannot pass.
• Makes it easy to assess whether or not students have met learning objectives.
• One of the primary archives students may use for this is the Media History Lantern, which has collections of German and Chinese language film culture magazines from the early 20th century, so students may use and translate these for their assignments if they wish.

• The number of sections and information in the instructions can be overwhelming for some students and make them anxious

Due to the number of sections and steps (and the problem of overwhelm) this semester we are scaffolding it with in-class writing exercises. the exercises are counted as secure assessment performed with pen on paper. They perform double duty as secure assessment as well as giving students the opportunity to practice or begin parts of the media archaeology assignment in class, and receive a mark and group feedback as they go.

• Independently conduct archival research on the history of film and television in a focused, coherent fashion, and be able to organise research materials into meaningful patterns on which hypotheses and arguments can be built
• Understand how the media of film and television have been defined and understood historically by practitioners, industries, and audiences; summarise and analyse how these ideas were formalised in the writings of key theorists.
• Work with others to find information and solve problems with database searches.

The template provided breaks the assignment into sections. Each section gives advice on whether or not gen AI would be appropriate and how it might be used. It makes it clear that gen AI cannot be used for the presentation of primary sources. In that section, students need to provide screenshots of the actual source and a link to its place in the archive, so any attempt to use gen AI for this is considered fabrication of evidence, and academic misconduct.