Reviewed by:
Hannah Plank, Digital Image Specialist
Visual Resources Library, Art History Department, Emory University
hplank@emory.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/hfb3-qe19
Launched in 2021 by the Hammer Museum at UCLA and digital projects agency Cogapp, Hammer Channel provides viewers with an accessible and easily navigable portal to view an extensive video archive of the museum’s programs virtually and on-demand. Covering the mid-2000s to the present, the site includes lectures, exhibition walkthroughs, panel discussions, and performances and addresses wide-ranging topics, including art, music, social justice, and education, among others. Additionally, by promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and connections, as well as featuring topics related to social justice, Hammer Channel directly contributes to the museum’s mission statement: “The Hammer Museum at UCLA believes in the promise of art and ideas to illuminate our lives and build a more just world.”
On the whole, Hammer Channel is a high-quality resource in that it offers a vast amount of diverse material while remaining intuitive and approachable. One can easily navigate, explore, discover, and make connections between various programs. For example, in the case of the video “TELETHON performance,” a work of feminist performance art, the “Related” tab offers other videos about feminism, as well as clickable keywords that can help viewers find additional videos that pertain to relevant themes. More broadly, navigability is a strength of Hammer Channel as viewers have are offered multiple ways to find materials, including a search function, filters, and a home page with categories for those who wish to browse. Navigation within videos also functions well, as viewers can drag the progress bar or click on a particular point in the included transcript to be taken to that part of the video. If the developers wished to add additional features to Hammer Channel, adding ten- or fifteen-second rewind and fast forward buttons would improve navigability for those who would like to hear a particular point again or skip ahead just a little.
One of Hammer Channel’s greatest strengths is its accessibility in that it is a free resource with no account needed and no advertisements, which are prevalent on other free video platforms. Hammer Channel includes the same features and ease of use on both desktop and mobile web browsers, further increasing access. Additionally, the inclusion of both transcripts and captions for each video makes the programming accessible to a wider audience. Expanding linguistic accessibility, a series of videos pertaining to the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 is available in both English and Spanish. The inclusion of additional bilingual programming would be a worthy direction for future exploration as it would allow more people to engage with Hammer Channel.
With its wide range of content, Hammer Channel can serve a wide variety of users. People with interests in art and social justice, as well as those who miss attending in-person programming in the age of COVID-19, will find plenty to enjoy. Further, the Hammer Channel platform includes a clipping tool that allows users to select and share sections of videos, which makes it ideal for educators and digital content creators. Following in this vein of encouraging information reuse, documentation for Hammer Channel’s open-source platform is provided on GitHub. Additionally, because the video transcripts are downloadable as text files, they could be used as a corpus for computational text analysis or other digital humanities research endeavors.
On the whole, Hammer Channel moves beyond the offerings of more general platforms like YouTube by offering an experience that is custom designed to suit the museum’s content and by providing transcripts. With more than one thousand videos available on the user-friendly platform after less than a year of existence, it promises to be a valuable resource for many.