gta Archiv
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Archive Seminar. Visual Storytelling in the Archive

Spring Semester 2025, Fridays 9.45-13.30

In the setting of the gta Archive, students will engage in archival research on architecture. In pairs, they will analyse archival items and select the evidence to formulate and visually convey a historical argument. The resulting narratives will be represented as scripted short films (3-4 minutes long).

The Archive Seminar aims to train students to analyse, evaluate, and select archival items to support a given hypothesis. This archival evidence will be used to create historical narratives, which the students will present as short, scripted videos. By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Differentiate between various archival concepts; discuss the archive’s societal and academic relevance
  
• Independently identify and interpret various types of research evidence to formulate a research hypothesis
  
• Systematically select, evaluate, analyse, and categorise research evidence (archival or from scientific literature)
  
• Order the archival evidence to create a viable historical narrative
  
• Develop graphic representations of the historical narrative as a storyboard
  
• Learn and implement digital editing and Generative AI skills for efficient video production and communication
  
• Create short, edited videos conveying a historical narrative through a selection of archival evidence.

The gta Archive is one of the most significant architectural repositories in Europe: located at ETH Zurich, yet relatively little used by students. The Archive Seminar unlocks this didactic potential by showing how students can work with archival material, how to engage in archival research, and how to formulate and visually represent historical narratives. Under guidance in an archival setting, students will analyse original and digitised archival items. 20-25 of these will be selected as pieces of evidence, with which the students, working in pairs, will construct short historical narratives, which they will represent through graphic storyboards and scripted short films. The seminar outcome will be a number of short videos (3-5 minutes long), which will be uploaded to an accessible online database.

The course is conceived in collaboration with MML (Media & Methods Lab) at ETH Zurich.

As the space in the gta Archive is limited, the seminar is restricted to 18 students. A motivation letter (max. 200 words, in English) is required upon application to be sent to Dr. Irina Davidovici .

Kontakt

PD Dr. Irina Davidovici