Cite
Hagener M and Roig-Sanz D (2024) Digital Film Historiography: Challenges of/and Interdisciplinarity. Journal of Cultural Analytics 9(4).
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Abstract
By Malte Hagener, Diana Roig-Sanz. This special issue contributes to the discussion of digital film historiography and identifies the main fields of advancement for the discipline. .
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Imported: 30 July 2024 9:28 am
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Finally, the sources relevant to the cinema’s past were rather peripheral and the necessary infrastructures for them were non-existent for the longest time. Many of the sources have not been digitized and they are still not available online. This is especially true for data related to historically underrepresented agents in film history such as women and for data pertaining to film cultures beyond the Global North.
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what distinguishes most digital approaches in the humanities and, more specifically, in digital film historiography is that we rely on data that is not fully structured and/or it does not fully exist yet and we need to produce it in the first place.1 Also, there is still a lack of standards that allow us to work in a consistent and coherent way as a community. Quantitative and data-driven approaches were not at the core of film studies which has a tradition rooted in qualitative analysis and film aesthetics.
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more projects and institutions make sources and data available (which is a good thing), but often they are not sufficiently aware of their potential to work collaboratively and the standards and norms that have been established in the information science and library community.
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Between the data producers, those who make the data available via specific infrastructures and the users that need quality-assured data for working with digital tools there remains, unfortunately, too often a gap that needs to be closed.
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If we use these methods (and both the essays by Diecke/Paiva and by Oiva et al make innovative use of those), we need to be wary of questions of replicability and transparency that used to be hallmarks of scientific working for good reasons.
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This is most clearly visible through the most important showcase, the Media History Digital Library3 and other national and transnational infrastructural projects such as media/rep/,4 which has focused so far on the accessibility of texts free of copyright, but which is extending its portfolio into historical material.
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attempts to institutionalize the field of digital film historiography have been promoted and discussing methods and epistemologies have become important goals for the activities of networks such as HOMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception),5 the Special Interest Group “Digital Humanities and Videographic Criticism” of the North-American SCMS6 (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) and the work group “Digital Methods” of NECS7 (Network for European Cinema and Media Studies)
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“European Cinema Audiences Project”8 and the rich resource “Cinema Context”.9 There is also a growing number of projects that aim at advancing digital methods in general and also explicitly deal with questions of film historiography such as the “Media Ecology Project” at Dartmouth College.10
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ERC project “Social Networks of the Past. Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity” at the Global Literary Studies Research Lab of the Open University of Catalonia,12 particularly focused on data-driven approaches applied to film criticism, film clubs, and the history of women in cinema history, and the Digital CinemaHub network at the universities of Marburg, Mainz, and Frankfurt (funded by the Volkswagen foundation) which set itself as its aim the implementation of data-driven methods in film studies.13
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Another question that remains to be answered is the role of aesthetics for digital methods. Of the papers collected here, only Oiva et al use the films themselves as data. All the other essays are concerned with metadata about the films or with material surrounding the films, paratexts such as reviews or fan material. It will be interesting to see how the field will develop in the coming years, as more tools will be developed and become available that allow for easier and more options at working with the visual and acoustic material of the films themselves.
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