Roman Catholic Engagements with Audio-Visual Media around the World (1928-2001). Exploring and Utilizing the OCIC and UNDA archives.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The multi-faceted history and development of the Catholic Church’s engagements with radio, cinema, and television in a variety of political, social and cultural climates could be seen as the media of modernity par excellence. During the first decades of the 20th century, the Church was initially reluctant to address audio-visual media issues and left this field wide open to laic initiatives. This led to the establishment of a plethora of different radio and film organisations. The two largest were the international umbrella organisations OCIC (Office Catholique International du Cinéma) and BCIR (Bureau Catholique International de Radio), renamed BCIRT (adding a ‘T’ for television) during the 1930s and later UNDA (Latin for ‘wave’), both founded in 1928. In 2001, OCIC and UNDA merged to form Signis, the ‘World Catholic Association for Communication’. In 2006, while Signis’ general secretariat was preparing to move to new offices, the archives and library of its predecessors were deposited in the KADOC research and documentation centre of the KU Leuven, where they have been available for research ever since. The fact that very few researchers have utilised them is partially due to both the size of the archives (over 90 meters), and partially due to a seemingly unstructured placement list, making the archives rather unpractical and unwieldy to work with. With this report, we aim to provide basic information about both organisations and to guide future researchers through the different archival funds related to OCIC and BCIRT. In 2015, Prof. Roel Vande Winkel and Dr. Leen Engelen acquired funding for the two-year research project ‘OCIC and UNDA from the Research Fund of the KU Leuven: Foundations for longitudinal, comparative and transnational research into Roman Catholic approaches to audio-visual media, 1928-2001’ (project code 3H150291). The project (2015-2017), for which Lieven Boes was employed as a researcher, was logistically supported by KADOC. This report is the tentative end product of the abovementioned project. The primary objectives of the project were to improve the accessibility of these archives for future research, conduct preliminary research on the history of OCIC, UNDA, and Catholic engagements with the audio-visual media in general, and explore the archives’ potential for future research. Initially, we will introduce OCIC and UNDA through a short history of both organisations, exploring the activities they deployed, the most important developments during their 73-year existence, and look into their relations with the Church, organised laity and the broader field of local, national, international, and intergovernmental (media-) organisations. In the second part of this report, we will introduce the OCIC-UNDA archives through a short history of the archives’ management and a detailed institutional history of the organisations that shaped them. Taking this into account, we will then analyse their structure and content and evaluate their state of preservation and lacunas. We will also provide an overview of the reference library’s contents with special attention to publications of OCIC, UNDA and their predecessors. There are also a number of relevant primary sources outside the bounds of OCIC and UNDA’s own archival and library collections. The archival collections kept at the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV) and Istituto per la Storia dell’Azione Cattolica e del Movimento cattolico in Italia Paolo VI (ISACEM) which have been explored in the context of this project, as well as the interviews with privileged witnesses conducted at the 2017 Signis International Congress in Québec will be touched on in this report. Finally, we will provide the reader with an overview of the data entered in the ODIS database for archival contextual information and an annotated bibliography of literature with direct relevance to the history of OCIC and UNDA.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it