Local media moments recalled in Seattle Television History project

Peter Kelley UW News

A wild-eyed television preacher, uncensored public access nuttiness, even a young Ellen DeGeneres featured on a local comedy show segment — when Stephen Groening had students explore the history of local television for a class, they sure found a lot of good stuff.

The students, about 40 in all, conducted this media scavenger hunt for a spring quarter class called Television History, taught by Groening, an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media. Groening will teach the class again in spring of 2017.

And what the students found — through online searches and explorations of UW Libraries extensive Special Collections — will live beyond the classes in an online archive Groening has created called the Seattle Television History Project.

The archive’s stated mission is to be an open-ended, publicly accessible research project “aimed at recovering, archiving and publicizing the local history of television in Seattle” and to serve as a site for original scholarship on the history of television.

That involves much more than just the old programs themselves. The archive is interested in press coverage of TV, television clubs and viewing parties as well as “the people of television — on-air talent, camera operators, producers, editors and interns — (who) all contribute to television culture and history.”

Items the students found are not just on the entertainment side, such as a history of comedy television in Seattle or an exploration of the work of locals Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, they dug into serious local history as well.

Other exhibits in the growing archive are about:

the civil rights movement as seen through Seattle TV

media coverage of the death of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain

the experiences of the Seattle Univision channel, and

the economics of sports broadcasting Seattle over the years

The Seattle Television History Project is supported with funding from the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media and the Simpson Center for the Humanities, enabling the archive to stream the contents of the exhibits and continue to add more exhibits as they come in.

Groening invites contributions to the archive. He also hopes to find funding for a subsequent project about the interconnections between local television and Seattle activism over the decades.

Beyond shows and the people who created or covered them, the archive also seeks to include the viewer experience.

Because we historically have watched TV privately in our homes, “the stories of television viewers have yet to be told,” notes from the site state. “Giving voice to specific viewer experiences is a crucial contribution to the history of media, cultural history and social history.”

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For more information, contact Groening at groening@uw.edu.