Using a distinct but, to my mind, representative episode from the series, I enjoyed drawing out the way The Last of Us engages with meanings and configurations of home. “Home,” as the first part of my video essay suggests, can constitute a safe space, sometimes a place of active retreat from danger.

I began learning about and making video essays in June 2023, a few months after I started learning how to play the harp. It strikes me that both endeavors require a certain amount of learning and un-learning: learning a new physicality and new technical skills, and un-learning assumptions about what makes a good finished product. Both the creation of video essays and playing the harp require a literal re-positioning of the body.

Like many other contributors, I caught the TV Dictionary bug during the pandemic (bad pun intended). Making a short video and following a single idea without the pressures and efforts that go into a “traditional” video essay publication (if there is such a thing) and without the requirements of conventional scholarly-theoretical framing, appealed to me and brought a very welcome sense of play into my work routine.

Creating the video essay on The Good Life for the TV Dictionary – the entry was “see under lifestyle(s)” – was enjoyable. The hardest part was figuring out how to condense so much visually-arresting and often humorous material into a short space of time. Well, that and the way in which the nostalgic pleasures of rewatching this iconic show from the 1970s were often tempered by the realization of the nature of some of the content.

Thus far, the TV Dictionary project has gathered an impressive number of 80 short video essays. Seeing these videographic works from the perspective of East-Central European scholars and television aficionados, what catches our attention (besides their aesthetic quality and theoretical/historical insight) is one tiny little thing.

It’s been said many times, not least by my PhD supervisor, that creativity loves constraint. A prompt such as Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary is a prime example of how working within rigid parameters can enable new discoveries about a particular media object, even one with which we consider ourselves familiar.

Among the most difficult aspects of videographic criticism is getting started.

Introduction In this post, we reflect on our TV Dictionary entries on The Bridge/Bron/Broen (2011-18), which were released at around the same time and made completely independently of each other.

My TV Dictionary entry, on the show American Bandstand (ABC, 1952-1989) was born of a struggle I experience as a scholar and videographer in being able to grasp, study and say something about daily television programs. Televisual fiction genres are usually studied as a single text, comprised of several or many episodes.

As a film, television and digital media scholar, videographic criticism is a format that I was aware of but had not yet put into practice. My interest in this medium led me to Ariel Avissar’s “TV Dictionary” which for me became a form of practical access into this world of videographic criticism. Participants familiar and new to this medium create content through a specific rubric, or algorithmic guidance: a tv show;