May 2015
“TV Programs e-Text System” Put in Practice at the University of Tokyo Graduate School
Akira Miyata / Hideaki Matsuyama
Since 2012 the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute has been developing and conducting “TV Programs e-Text System” that streams archived TV programs over the Internet for specific university courses. This article reports a seminar held at the University of Tokyo Graduate School in 2014 (guided by Prof. Shunya Yoshimi), in which the system was out in practice. The purpose of implementing the system in this seminar was to emphasizing the independence of the students. Eighteen graduate students from eight countries participated. The students were divided into groups and requested to watch TV programs streamed via “e-Text” in or out of laboratory. Then, at the seminar, they discussed the content in groups and delivered presentations using English as a common language. Students with different cultural background freely shared their sensibilities, with which many “solutions” encompassed in the archived programs were elicited. For example, when Prof. Yoshimi provided them with a topic for discussion “gaze,” students presented diverse analyses of the target program by starting from the topic but gradually and uniquely shifting their perspectives. A number of attracting “shifts” displayed by individual students offered various insights for research on archived programs.