BBC Rewind brings history to life
The BBC has produced massive amounts of content throughout its 95-year history, and thanks to BBC Rewind, this content can now be searched and repackaged for new audiences. Several attempts have been made in the past to digitise the BBC Archive for use on online platforms but this was the one that stuck. A team from the then newly-formed Rewind staff participated in the BBC #newsHACK Editors Lab, which was held simultaneously in Dublin and Glasgow in May 2014. We caught up with Andy Martin who joined the project following the hackathon.
Handled by a staff based at BBC Northern Ireland, BBC Rewind is an internal database acting as “a Google-type search of the entire BBC archive”. So far, they have digitised just over one third of all visual holdings. The goal was to be able to exploit archived content to tell new stories.
One content type that has come out of the effort are “stream pieces”, or short, socially-shareable videos. “We published a piece looking at the greatest leaks of our time to coincide with the Panama Papers, and for a period it was the most watched shortform video on the BBC,” said Andy. Other subjects have included a look back at Super Tuesdays, 40 years of Apple and FA Cup clichés.
More about BBC Rewind from BBC News Labs
Your Story is one product that has been curated by the Rewind team. It allows you to see historical highlights from a personalised range of time, for example, since you were born. Your Story is designed to trigger reminiscence, which can be comforting to those suffering from dementia. They promoted the tool for Dementia Week and hope to introduce a further personalisation where users may be able to add photos or videos from their own life to the historical events presented in Your Story. A later iteration of Your Story placed people in their most likely role during the Battle of the Somme.
Developing Nations is another product being developed by BBC Rewind. The idea is to recreate person-on-the-street interviews dating back decades: speak to people about the same issues on the same street corners that can be found in the archives. “We will try to draw a comparison to see how, if at all, we have developed in terms of our attitudes. I think we will do something along the lines of serious issues and some funny issues, just to see how things have changed,” Andy said.
The BBC Rewind team has grown to some 15 staff since it’s conception at the Editors Lab in 2014 including researchers, producers, project managers and developers. The Rewind staff also works closely with BBC Research & Development as well as BBC Archives, who are “the people who curate, and protect and preserve the archive”, many of them from a librarian background.
Coming from a journalism background, Andy hadn’t had the opportunity to team up with developers before beginning work on BBC Rewind. As editorial folks can be “frankly are a bit more dreamy and a bit more conceptual” than their technical colleagues, it helps to have a direct working relationship of a cross-functional team, similar to those we find at hackathons. Andy has been impressed with this collaborative process. He’ll ask a developer on his team, “‘You know, can we do this?’ They say, ‘Yeah, give me a few minutes,’ and they go away and they hammer away at a keyboard and they come back and they say, ‘Is this what you were thinking of?’, and invariably it is exactly what I was thinking of.”
Andy was surprised at how engaged his colleagues have been with the archive, “It really seems to have forged a kind of common interest…it has become a fascination.” Through this interest, Rewind has not only bridged a gap between editorial and technical teams, but also the various BBC entities across the UK: “We’re working with BBC Scotland, with BBC Wales, with BBC London centrally. It has tied the BBC together a little bit more than it was before,” he said.
Other BBC Rewind products include Timeliner and the BBC Archive Twitter account.
