The Moving Image: A User’s Manual – from the MIT Press | Research

Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively.

Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, MIT’s Peter Kaufman presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politics.law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how it’s the moving image—not social media, not artificial intelligence, but television networks and online video—that has played such an outsized role in bringing personalities like Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, and Netanyahu to the front of the world stage and deepening what journalist Hanna Rosin calls our “epistemic chasm of cuckoo.”

Kaufman also explains how best to produce video, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, ultimately, archive and preserve it. With detailed guidance on producing and deploying video and sound for publication, finding and using archival video and sound, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing questions about citation, preservation, and storage—across the broadest spectrum of platforms, publications, disciplines, and formats—The Moving Image equips readers for the medium’s continued ascendance in education, publishing, and knowledge dissemination in the decades to come. And modeled in part on Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, it’s also a highly enjoyable read.

Reviews

“Indispensable. A groundbreaking guide to navigating video as today’s dominant medium.”

Allissa V. Richardson, author of Bearing Witness While Black

“A work of genius. The book tells us how to preserve, protect, and curate the moving image as an integral part of fighting back against our current epistemic implosion.”

Lee McIntyre, author of On Disinformation

“This visionary work is an essential, authoritative, and entertaining companion for makers, authors, and scholars that will help them produce, deploy, and quote moving images with fluency and integrity.”

Rick Prelinger, archivist and Emeritus Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz

“At a time when video has become the dominant medium of communication, Kaufman provides a much-needed primer for scholars and practitioners alike.”

Sandra Ristovska, author of Seeing Human Rights