FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Many waves in technology development are stories of powerful entities becoming more powerful.  However, our work with audiovisual archives aims technology development along an alternative trajectory: rather than reinforcing the global monoculture, preserving the diversity of human experience and reducing the risk that less that less visible communities are absent from the historical record.


In this presentation, we describe work that follows this alternative trajectory to address such “archival absences". First, we introduce the CLAMS platform for computational processing of audiovisual archives. CLAMS is an open-source software designed to operate on modest, local hardware, permitting data sovereignty. With this computational context, we present two case studies from the collaboration between archivists at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and researchers at Brandeis University on using technology to repair archival absences.  


The first case study focuses on cataloging items in broadcast television archives, demonstrating a multi-stage AI processing pipeline used by archivists to surface lesser-known individuals who appeared in old broadcast television programs in order to enrich metadata and improve discoverability.


The second case study focuses on linguistic absence and diversity. While ASR systems such as Whisper yield high quality transcripts of speech in high-resource languages, these systems offer no benefit for the unsupported languages and even produce misleading and nonsensical outputs. We present ongoing work on language identification for multilingual broadcast content, focusing on indigenous languages such as Yupik and Samoan. This includes challenges in segmentation, annotation, and evaluation, as well as the design of annotation workflows in collaboration with community experts.
These case studies illustrate how computational tools, when designed in collaboration with archivists and communities, can support more inclusive and representative audiovisual archives.  We close the presentation with an invitation to consider other sources of archival absence that can be resisted through creative collaborations between archivists and AI.

[Simultaneous translation POR-ENG will be available]

The panel proposes a reflection on preservation and access to films made by women in Brazil, focusing on short films. Nayla Guerra presents a survey of a filmography she compiled, comprising 222 short films directed by 121 women during the Brazilian military dictatorship, and analyzes the importance and challenges involved in recovering these works. Often regarded as a format of less cultural, social, and historical importance, short films tend to receive less attention and are frequently overlooked when decisions are made regarding preservation, restoration, and access initiatives. Many of these works are lost, damaged, or available only in analog formats, making access to shorts made by women during this period particularly difficult.
Next, Carolina Vergotti presents a study on the preservation of these 222 shorts, including the conditions of the films in the Cinemateca Brasileira’s collection, analyzed using the methodologies adopted by the institution. The diagnostic aims to demonstrate the gaps in the collection, the risks faced by some of these films, as well as possible paths for the preservation and access to these works for restoration, research, and diffusion.
Finally, Patrícia Machado introduces a recent initiative she has been leading for the digitization and expanded access to these works. She presents a platform created by her project that provides what she calls the “biographies of films”, making information about the production contexts of these films, how they circulated, which archives hold them, and their preservation conditions accessible. The project also involves digital preservation and access to films that remain forgotten or are undergoing deterioration.
By combining theoretical and practical perspectives, the panel aims to draw attention to the gaps in the representation of women within archival collections and to present possible actions for recovering these works and, consequently, the contributions of women to the history of cinema.