Main Content

Book of Abstracts

Keynote

Do Visualizations have Politics? The Power of Interactivity in Data Visualizations

Marian Dörk (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)

From data journalism to digital cultural heritage, visualization plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of complex cultural, political, and economic issues. While its defining feature is certainly visual encoding—the process of turning data patterns into visual patterns—the interactive capabilities of visualization are seldom up for debate. We may criticize the color scale or layout, but the dynamic qualities of visualizations are often taken for granted and simply accepted as a given. Especially in the context of cultural heritage, the interaction techniques provided by collection interfaces, such as the predominant keyword search, can have a significant impact on what we make of our cultural heritage. A critical approach to data visualization should question the role of interactivity and also propose alternative avenues for engaging with digital cultural heritage. What can we practically do with a visualization of cultural heritage? And how is the space of possibilities structured in collection interfaces? Drawing from numerous research and design projects in collaboration with cultural institutions, this presentation examines central concepts for thinking and talking about interactivity in data visualization. It challenges us to consider what can be done with visualizations and how interactivity shapes our understanding and engagement with data. By critically examining the interactive capabilities of visualization, we can better understand the power dimensions of data visualizations and their impact on diverse audiences. The overarching aim is to devise a vocabulary that can connect theoretical principles with practical experience, creating a common ground for interdisciplinary collaboration among technologists, humanists, and designers.

Panel 1: Archival Silences and Missing Data

(De-)Visualising Colonial Film Data: Unsettled Knowledge and Potential Archival Violence in Digital Infrastructures

Sonia Campanini (Goethe University Frankfurt)

This paper addresses the digital curation of African colonial film cultures from a postcolonial perspective, drawing on the example of the institutional platforms Archivio Luce and Colonial Film. Considering the digital representation of colonial films as a form of unsettled knowledge, I identify various forms of potential archival violence (Azoulay 2019) encoded in archival practices and digital infrastructures. I reflect on how, through these digital platforms, Italian and British film institutions act as information gatekeepers in the circulation of colonial films and as memory agents in the formation of their historiographies. Although free online digital access seems to allow for an open and global visibility of colonial film data, the infrastructural and technological conditions of digital platforms' existence reveal the contradictions of this promise and highlight postcolonial implications in terms of archival politics.

What is Historical Data in the Absence of Archival Material? Women in Mid-Century British Animation Studios

Bella Honess Roe (University of Surrey)

The presence of women in positions of creative agency at British animation studios in the mid-twentieth century has been barely acknowledged by animation, film and media history. Apart from Joy Batchelor, who co-ran Britain’s most prolific animation studio of this period with her husband John Halas, the women who worked as animators and ran animation departments at studios including Halas & Batchelor, Larkins and Biographic are relatively unknown. I have previously explored this neglect through a feminist media history approach (e.g. Gledhill & Knight, Sobchack, Gaines) and the idea that the absence of women from film history says more about the gendered nature of doing history than history itself. In the next phase of this project, I am taking a critical approach to the archival silences that have led to this historical lacuna by thinking through what constitutes historical data and what we do when there is virtually no archival record, as is the case with British animation studios from the mid-twentieth century. In addition, I am exploring digital humanities approaches to disseminating my research findings and failures as a way of questioning what and how constitutes historical data in the absence of archival material. What are the ways in which we can share the existence of these women and their contribution to film history, while acknowledging their absence from the archive and, until now, film history?

Amateur Film, Women’s Cultural Production and Feminist Approaches to Metadata

Sarah Arnold (Maynooth University)

This talk details the work undertaken on two projects formed of collaborations between archivists, historians and feminist scholars to think about and action feminist-led metadata schemas and cataloguing practices to better represents women’s cultural production in archival contexts.  The first project I’ll speak about, Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing, is an AHRC-IRC Digital Humanities-funded project concerned with creating tools that support audiovisual archives in making visible and searchable amateur film works by women. The project was a collaboration between archivists from the Irish Film Archive and the East Anglia Film Archive and researchers from Maynooth University and the University of East Anglia all of whom had an interest in women’s creative work and labour but recognised that there were multiple intersecting undervaluings of women’s creative and film work. Taking the already unappreciated amateur film as its case study, the project had the objective of developing methods of revaluing women’s amateur filmmaking by making available to the public the films themselves, by rethinking metadata schematics to identify biases and omissions that make women’s filmmaking difficult to access and developing an open-access toolkit that could be made available to audiovisual archives concerned with the marginalisation of women’s amateur filmmaking. The project had at its core a feminist ethics of care through which is recognised that archival work is often women’s work and that any tools and methods that developed should be cognisant of the laboriousness of archival work. The project was concerned, therefore, with the value of labour both of archivists and of the filmmakers whose work was ‘hard to reach’ in archives.  I’ll also speak about the ongoing second project, Empowering Archives, in which the project team developed and brought to archives, community and heritage groups across the UK and Ireland a toolkit aimed at creating inclusive metadata. In particular, I’ll talk about the need for flexibility and adaptability when dealing with different stakeholders who have an interest in inclusivity and diversity in archiving and conserving cultural objects like film. 

“Are You Sure You Want to Delete this Image?”: Reflections on Archival Appraisal in the Digital Age

Charlotte Bruns (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Dulce Van Vliet - da Rocha Gonçalves (Eindhoven University of Technology)

The determination of a photograph’s archival worth is rooted in the historical context of institutions tasked with preserving, cataloging, and providing access to photographs as part of their social function. How large amounts of image data are dealt with is connected to the authority that archives hold and how it will evolve in the future. It decides which logic of distribution and circulation controls the access to the historical and cultural memory of society, and to what extent the archived photographs are socially accepted as part of society’s visual culture and historical understanding. During the appraisal process, archivists make decisions that have a fundamental impact on how a society in general— and historians in particular— can create relationships to the past. It is not only a question of deciding which images to keep and which to destroy, but also how this decision can reposition or reframe the relative prominence of what is preserved. At present, the appraisal process of images needs to deal with specific challenges emerging from digitization processes and digital-born images. In the first section of this paper, we will present four main challenges identified during expert interviews with archivists. These include trying to avoid knowledge loss, the necessity or not of archiving the original, the growing number of digital photographs, the practical comparability during the appraisal process and the difficulty of assessing originality and integrity of (digital born) sources. In the second section, we propose to reflect on possible mitigation strategies for these challenges, which can involve digital methods such as distant viewing, or, on the other hand, a more participatory and collaborative approach which borrows propositions from the field of digital public history. These include concepts such as shared authority, digital hermeneutics for archivists and historians, or archiving structures such as the “post-custodial” model.

Panel 2: Data Visualization and Film Heritage

Social Network Analysis to Find Women through a Cultural Mediator

Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut (Open University of Catalonia)

My research aims to reinterpret narratives documenting women's involvement in some of the earliest Ibero-American film clubs, which emerged between the late 1920s and the 1930s. The notable absence of references in secondary literature regarding the relationship between women and film clubs is striking; there is a lack of research on this topic. Consequently, when investigating the connection between women and film clubs, we encounter a significant dearth of data, with available information being sporadic. Nevertheless, women played pivotal and highly active roles in the nascent film club movement. This issue is not unique to women, as film clubs, as subjects of study, have been largely overlooked by historiography. Consequently, this often necessitates working with indirect data and making inferences to advance our understanding of the subject. To address this issue, I propose several theoretical-conceptual and methodological strategies to reassess women's involvement in the earliest Ibero-American film clubs. These strategies involve a combination of qualitative methods, such as network analysis utilizing Actor-Network Theory, and quantitative methods, such as Social Network Analysis. My approach entails constructing an ego-network cantered around a woman identified as a key figure through qualitative research, who played a significant role in both cultural and cinematic spheres. Subsequently, using Social Network Analysis methods, I aim to identify other individuals who, due to their proximity to the primary figure, may have also played crucial roles within the same domain. In my presentation, I will explore the challenges and outcomes encountered by my colleagues and myself when implementing this interdisciplinary methodology.

From Joinville to New Jersey: Early Women Workers Mobilities

Clara Auclair (University of Rochester / Université Paris Cité)

This paper examines the archival representations of women laboratory workers in France and in the United States, by focusing on the trajectory of French laboratory workers who emigrated to New Jersey from 1905 to the 1920s. Around 1905, French studios such as Pathé, Gaumont and Eclair decided to build film facilities in the United States, in the hope to keep their leading position on an increasing competitive market. Outside of discrete monographs and articles about a few figures having spent time in Fort Lee, mostly film directors like Alice Guy Blaché, Maurice Tourneur or Albert Capellani, our knowledge of Fort Lee’s French industrial past remains anecdotal. Little information exists on how the companies were set up and the relationship they maintained with the Parisian branches. The goal of this paper is to expand our understanding of women’s involvement in the silent film industry by focusing on this moment of Franco- American film history. I argue that while few traces of individual workers can be recovered in the corporate archives or in the film themselves, research into immigration and census records help us to bring these women out of their anonymity. By focusing on individual mobility, instead of the international and industrial strategies of film production studios, my aim is to highlight the agency of film workers in the industrialization process of film production and to recover careers and profiles that have been obscured by traditional approaches to early film history.

Visualising the Women Who Made British Cinema

Melanie Bell (University of Leeds), Cassie Ulph (University of Leeds)

This paper reflects on the process of visualising data drawn from the BECTU Membership Database, a collection of trade union membership records of technicians employed in the British film industry. Focussing on the period between 1930 and 1955, the project examined the gendered composition of the workforce with the goal of enhancing the visibility of women workers in film history. It did this to reimagine film history through a feminist lens, one where established and gendered definitions of “work” and “value” were redefined. The process of visualising film historical data draws attention to the challenge of ‘semantic distance’ in humanities infovis, identified by Houda Lamqaddam et al as the ‘crucial gap between humanists experience of their material and research practice on one side, and the representation of said material in infovis tools on the other’ (1). This paper will outline our attempts to bridge that gap at both the data-modelling and visualisation stages. Drawing on the process begun in Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema (2) , the transformation of this semi-structured data into a structured dataset has required mixed-methods approach, in which the quantitative analysis of significant and meaningful commonalities and the qualitative excavation of specificity of experience are mutually informing. Developing visualisations that embed narrative nuance and multidirectionality has allowed us to reflect on, and give voice to (rather than silence), gaps or inconsistencies in the data. The visualisation of this dataset therefore goes beyond statistical (mis)representation, to become interpretative practice. In this respect, the paper connects with the work by Dang and others (3) which reflects on (feminist) film historiography and epistemology.

Panel 3: Digital Explorations of Women's Filmmaking

The Lumière Sisters: Alternative Feminist Historiography and Speculation with (AI-Generated) Image Archives

Kristina Köhler (Universität zu Köln)

In her work Achievement (2024), Cuban artist Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo uses AI-generated images as an instrument for a feminist and decolonial historiography and as alternative archive. While colonial photography of the 19th century often cast Black women in the roles of slaves, indigenous and oppressed, the images generated by Delahante Matienzo depict these women as strong, empowered and proud.  My project of a speculative historiography of the Lumière sisters begins with a similar thought experiment: How can we rethink the history of the Lumière cinematograph (and early cinema in general) from the sisters' perspective? Unlike Delahante Matienzo, I do not use AI-generated images in my research, but I work with the historical image collections (film and photography) from the Institut Lumière's holdings.  With my paper, I would nevertheless like to bring my approach into resonance with Delahante Matienzo's artistic work as two distinct, yet related strategies to visualize the counterfactual in and with images. How can AI-generated stimulate us to rethink the status of images, as sources and material for speculative forms of feminist and decolonial historiography?

Datafication of Women's Filmmaking in the GDR: A Digital Film Analysis Approach

Josephine Diecke (University of Zurich)

In reunified Germany, it took 30 years to focus on women directors from the former GDR (Klauß and Schenk, 2019). Prominent male figures like Konrad Wolf and Frank Beyer had previously dominated the spotlight. This presentation provides insights into the recently unearthed works of DEFA women directors such as documentary filmmakers Angelika Andrees, Helke Misselwitz, and Chetna Vora, as well as feature film directors like Bärbl Bergmann, Iris Gusner, and Evelyn Schmidt. To foster deeper investigation into female perspectives in GDR filmmaking, digital methods of computer-assisted film and video analysis can be beneficial. Recent years have seen a notable surge in tools and methods for the computational analysis of audiovisual media (Pustu-Iren et al., 2020). These approaches must be critically applied, considering both data and tools, and raising questions such as which annotation algorithms and terminologies are used, which tools and mixed-methods approaches are suitable, and how to consider finite resources and fair working conditions. Manual and automatic video annotations can also illuminate the visibility of women in front of and behind the camera. One approach is to address questions examined by the Bechdel-Wallace test (Bechdel, 1986), concerning the stereotyping of women, and pair them with digital methods. Similarly, Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton analyzed screen time and speaking parts of protagonists in sitcoms, applying their Distant Viewing theory and method (Arnold and Tilton, 2023). This paper presents experiences of annotating a corpus of films by GDR women filmmakers using VIAN (Flueckiger and Halter, 2020) and TIB-AV-A (Springstein et al., 2023). It examines parameters for capturing aesthetic, narrative, and societal characteristics, as well as gender-analytical aspects, and critically reflects on the process of digital film analysis and its results.

(In-)Visible? - Exploring Data on Women Working in the German Film Industry during the Weimar Period

Theresa Blaschke (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Derya Tok (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Yvonne Zimmermann (Philipps-Universität Marburg)

Discussing the visibility of individuals involved in feature film production may at first glance seem unnecessary. Obviously, actresses and actors in front of a camera are more visible to an audience than those working behind the scenes. But if we take this discussion of visibility to the level of data on people working in the film industry, do we inevitably come to the same conclusion? While maintaining a critical view on the binary approach of comparing men vs. women, this paper seeks to explore the data on the role of women in the production of German feature films between the First and Second World War, both in front of and behind the camera. Using a data set of individuals who collaborated on these feature films, made available by the German internet platform Filmportal, and enriching it with information from Wikidata, enables us to conduct a network analysis that addresses several questions: What is the role of women within these networks of filmmakers? Do they tend to work with the same individuals or are the groups more diverse? At the same time, the information given on Wikidata can broaden the picture: What kind of information does Wikidata give on these women (e.g. their professions) and where does additional information come from (e.g. GND, VIAF)? Through this exploratory approach, our paper aims to evaluate the overall role of women in the film industry during the Interwar period and determine whether there is a visible difference between actresses and women working behind the camera in the light of network research and data availability.

Panel 4: Archival Narratives

Reframing the Weimar Cinema Canon: Digital Methodologies and Archival Narratives

Isadora Campregher Paiva (University of Amsterdam)

The dominant narrative about the canon of Weimar cinema is that it was constructed after WWII by the work of two expatriate German scholars: Siegfried Kracauer (1947) and Lotte Eisner (1952). Their analyses have been subsequently criticized for focusing on dark films, in a teleological attempt to explain the rise of Nazism (Elsaesser, 2013). I wish to counter this narrative, arguing that not only does this oversimplify the contribution of Kracauer and Eisner, it underestimates the importance of film distribution and archives in the construction of the canon. I contend that the Weimar canon – with all its perceived darkness – was largely established in the 1920s and 1930s, based on the films that were exported as German masterpieces and fêted first by critics, then by the influential film societies of cities like London, Paris and New York, the members of which would go on to become founders of the BFI, the Cinémathèque Française and the MoMA Film Library. Using a combination of textual analysis and descriptive statistics, I will go over digitized materials such as contemporary reviews of Weimar films, screenings of The (London) Film Society (1925- 1936) and records of the first films purchased by MoMA and the Cinémathèque Française, pointing to their overlap with the current canon and their divergence from the most popular films in Germany (as measured by Garncarz, 2013). I will also discuss some of the films that received early international praise and that have been subsequently forgotten, ultimately arguing that decisions about what kinds of films are most deserving of being salvaged have historically been determined by path-dependent judgments of aesthetic quality and representativeness of “national cinemas”. I will demonstrate how digital methods can be used to critically engage with previously established discourses and shine a quantifying light on the history of canonization.

Let’s Talk about Arabic Periodicals: A Practical Critique of Digital Infrastructures of Exclusion

Till Grallert (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Arabic is a prime example for under-resourced languages in the digital realm despite of being one of six official languages of the United Nations with more than 420 million active speakers, the liturgical language of approximately 1.9 billion Muslims, and the writing system of many historic and contemporary Asian and African languages. Working with textual material in Arabic from and within geographic regions with severely limited access to utilities forces us to reckon with the linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1997) and epistemic violence (c.f. Fiormonte 2021) of global networked knowledge production and the cumbersome details of the multidimensional digital divides embodied in the infrastructural underpinnings of scholarship. This paper focuses on the practical consequences, the always concrete affordances the politics of archive and representation create for the digitisation of specific societies’ cultural record: namely, Arabic periodicals during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire as the first mass medium of the Eastern Mediterranean. The paper presents our experiences from two research projects as a practical critique of infrastructures of exclusion: Jarāʾid, a crowd-sourced union list of all Arabic periodicals published worldwide until 1929, and Open Arabic Periodical Editions (OpenArabicPE) as a framework for bootstrapped scholarly editions outside the global north. Both projects successfully address two interconnected needs of marginalised scholarly communities as well as the cultural artefacts’ communities of origin through minimal computing (Gil and Ortega 2016): Creatively repurpose existing open data, tools, and infrastructures in order to provide sustainable public and free access to reliable knowledge about periodicals as well as high-quality digital editions in their original script and languages.

Gendered Readings of Aggregated Letter Metadata: New Perspectives on a Nineteenth-Century Society and its Archival Traces?

Ilona Pikkanen (Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki), Hanna-Leena Paloposki (Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki)

”Digital archives are dark, not bright; occluded, not readily knowable; and undertagged, underinscribed, and underavailable”, Jo Guldi reminds us in her recent book The Dangerous Art of Text Mining. A Methodology for Digital History (2023, 36). This paper interrogates a new digital archive, consisting of aggregated letter catalogues (finding aids) of nineteenth-century person archives held by the main cultural heritage organisations (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) in Finland. The material tells us about correspondence networks of nineteenth-century estate society; but as importantly, it also reveals whose actions and experiences are considered significant enough to be archived and catalogued in different “local” contexts (different organisations). Moreover, the dataset as a whole allows for multilayered reflections on the mechanisms of heritigization, inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting in relation to a key period of Finnish nation-building. The paper focuses on women’s letter collections. How gendered are the epistolary collections under study? Do women have a visible role as records’ creators (as ”archival protagonists”)? How do such epistemic decisions by archivists affect historical research? The material discussed in this paper – digital metadata of person archives – has been aggreated in an ongoing research project funded by the Research Council of Finland (2021-2025) and the dataset currently includes information from about one million letters / sets of correspondence. The collected actor data is enriched by linking the actor instances to external databases and ontologies such as Wikidata, GND and Finnish biographical datasets. It is argued that such large-scale digital aggregation of archival collection metadata, bringing together records that have been separated in different organisations gives us an unprecedented, broad and historically deep perspective on archival practices (archival politics, collection policies and cataloguing priorities) and their inherent biases or occlusions (see also Ahnert et al. 2020; D’Ignazio et al. 2020; Guldi 2023).

Panel 5: Infrastructures and Messy Data

From Cinephile Lists to Filmographies and Databases: A Critical Archaeology of Shared and Contested Data Culture

Malte Hagener (Philipps-Universität Marburg)

Almost from the beginning of film culture in the modern sense (Hagener 2014), there was a marked tendency towards data, already in the predigital period. Organising information took many forms: making lists was a popular pastime in cinephilia, journalists compiled filmographies, and people filled tables with all kind of information concerning film and cinema. As so often, these data were not neutral, but often employed by institutions and people with certain goals in mind, using their institutional and interpersonal ambitions to follow certain goals. In the postwar period the tendency towards lists, a popular form to organize data, was ubiquitous, perhaps most visible in the Sight & Sound-poll that has been conducted every decade since 1952. Whereas this might be the most visible case of data that yields considerable influence the growing interest in forming collections went hand in hand with a tendency towards datafication.
My presentation aims at uncovering the hidden genealogies of shared (and contested) data culture which is also a history of power imbalances and the strategic employment of data in the service of reaching specific goals. Basically, all collections (of heritage institutions, but also beyond that) rely in different ways on structured information, so the genealogy of an organization is often inscribed in the data that it is using (Gitelman 2006). Using approaches from media archaelogy thus helps us to critically understand the specific ways that cultural heritage data is organized.

Film Data in Context – Archival Considerations on Messy Data and What to Make of it

Adelheid Heftberger (Bundesarchiv, Berlin)

„Most Data arrive on our computational doorstep context-free“, claim Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein in their pivotal book Data Feminism. This rings true for a lot of contemporary data sets – for various reasons - but unfortunately also for data in cultural heritage institutions, where an abundance of data on the one side and a lack on the other make it difficult to provide useful data sets for research. While this is old news, there are no fast and easy ways out, and archives are exploring different paths to provide more content related data via AI and human intervention as well as dedicate more time to critically analyse descriptions. By using the Bundesarchiv as an example, I will elaborate on some of the above thoughts.  I will aim to highlight the significance of a shared corpus for film historic research like the ones used for text linguistics containing filmographic and holdings information by presenting the FIAF Knowledge graph, a Linked Data project being carried out by the International Federation of Film Archives. Messy data is at the core of this project as well as any data aggregation projects and must be dealt with. Thus established workflows of standardisation and authority records management are challenged in a complex world where straightforward entities like „country of origin“ need to be re-evaluated. Lastly, I will present a recently created document on „Decolonizing Film Catalogues“ which stirred some discussion in the community.

More Than Words: Diversify Collections Descriptions through Community Collaboration and Machine Learning. Insights into the DE-BIAS Project

Kerstin Herlt (DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum)

Libraries, archives and museums are key players in the construction of our cultural memory and shape the collective understanding of history and culture. Decisions about which objects are collected, preserved and made accessible have often been made from the perspective of the majority society, which has led to the voices and perspectives of marginalised and underrepresented communities being neglected. Initiated by civil society movements, initiatives and projects for a decolonial archival practice have emerged in recent years, focussing on transforming Eurocentric and colonially influenced archival methods. A key aspect here is the active participation of those communities whose cultural objects and narratives are archived. This should ensure that their perspectives and cultural knowledge are adequately taken into account in collections and collection descriptions. One example of such a collaborative project is DE-BIAS, which has developed a glossary and AI-supported tool to identify and contextualise discriminatory terms in large data sets. The presentation will provide insights into the solutions and challenges of the project. 

Panel 6: Data Bias and Counter Archives

More Than Words: Diversify Collections Descriptions through Community Collaboration and Machine Learning. Insights into the DE-BIAS project

Teaching the Radical Catalog – A Syllabus 

Eva Weinmayr (Academy of Art and Design, Basel and at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg), Lucie Kolb (Academy of Art and Design, Basel and at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg)

Whether a collection of print media or a digital archive, a library is a key place for accessing, activating, and disseminating knowledge. Typically, a library is a highly classified space that formalises and organises knowledge into categories – both intellectually and spatially.  The presentation will interrogate the prevailing methods and practices of describing, naming, and classifying knowledges with a particular focus on the library catalogue. Building on the artistic research project Teaching the Radical Catalogue — a Syllabus, exhibited at “Reading the Library” at the Art Library Foundation Sitterwerk, St. Gallen (CH) in 2021, this presentation will focus on experimental methods to decentre normative concepts of validating and classifying knowledges. Taking New-York based librarian Emily Drabinski's text “Teaching the Radical Catalog” (2008)“ as a starting point to develop an open educational resource the project aims to render the historically produced orders and colonial hierarchies legible and address the structural inadequacies underlying library classification in the Global North. In “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999), sociologist Susan Leigh Star writes that infrastructures only becomes visible when they are not working. Because infrastructures tend to be maintained in the background, it is difficult to intervene and criticise them. This is why we will present critical contemporary practices of radical cataloguing which show ways how to render the catalogue not just readable, but writable.
radicalcatalogue.

Queering Archives? Curating a Digital ‘Counter Archive’ of Performance

Nora Probst (University of Paderborn)

A distinctive aspect of the Cologne Institute for Media Culture and Theatre is its Theatre Studies Collection (Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, TWS), which stands as one of the most expansive university archives dedicated to theatre and media history in Europe. During the winter semester of 2023/24, a group of students embarked on a tentative exploration of lesser-known sections of the photographic collection of the TWS. Guided by theoretical insights from Gender and Queer Studies as well as by perspectives from digital humanities, critical theory, and information science, this investigation under my supervision sought to "queer" archival materials by critically interrogating established archiving and digitization practices. The overarching objective was to curate a queer digital counter-archive of performance-related materials, addressing intersectional aspects of gender identity, gender performance, sexual orientation, and heteronormativity in theatre performances. In my presentation, I will delve into the power-critical processes involved in queering, selecting, categorizing, modeling, and processing (meta)data at the intersection of material and immaterial cultural heritage. The process of curating a queer counter archive will be contextualized against the backdrop of mandatory utilization of technological infrastructures, authority data (such as GND), and controlled vocabularies (including Homosaurus). I will address issues of representation, consent, and cultural sensitivity, particularly in relation to marginalized communities whose narratives are often overlooked, misrepresented, or exploited in traditional archives. In addition to examining the practicalities of queering archival materials, the investigation grappled with the ethical dimensions inherent in such endeavors and discussed the question of (in)visibility – especially of images, entities and concepts that resist or elude processes of categorization altogether.

Costume Design in The Norwegian Filmography

Maria Fosheim Lund (University of Oslo), Ingrid S. Holtar (National Library of Norway)

This paper proposes to explore questions related to creating and visualizing film historical data through a case study of the Norwegian online database, Norsk filmografi, and the status of the costume designer in it. Norsk filmografi (Norwegian filmography), curated and hosted by the National Library of Norway, is the only extensive film catalogue of Norwegian cinema publicly available. It is dedicated to a subset of Norwegian film heritage: The feature film with theatrical or other public release. In April 2024, the filmography contains 1331 entries covering the entire history of feature film production in Norway. In its present form, it is a useful directory that gives the possibility of searching by title, name, production company, or year. However, by working directly with the file containing the filmography (JSON), it is possible to extract and visualize the data in new ways – making visible, as it were, hitherto invisible connections, networks, and developments of Norwegian film history. What remains invisible, even with direct usage of the filmography, is the construction of the metadata in the first place. Metadata is often the result of concrete choices. These choices, however, are not transparent, and meticulous work is needed to retrospectively uncover them. In this paper, we aim to explore these possibilities and challenges in a feminist film historical perspective through a case study of the lost legacy of the film costume designer - usually a female film worker - in Norwegian film history. The paper will develop through two explorative moves. First, we ask: what possibilities do database calls give us for visualizing the costume designer in Norwegian film history? Second, we problematize the catalogue and database as neutral entities by analyzing the crediting practice of costume design in a selection of Norwegian films and its translation into Norsk filmografi.

Panel 7: Digital Exhibitions and Living Archives

Musical Works and Digital Traces

Miriam Akkermann (Freie Universität Berlin)

While the transmission of acoustic music is historically based primarily on written documents such as score, playing instructions and descriptions of how to play a specific instrument, electroacoustic music and computer music requires both, new ways of documenting and new approaches to archiving the information concerning the musical content as well as the devices employed. These processes are strongly influenced by and mutually dependent on rapid (digital) technological developments. The ever-new technologies cause, for example, a constant urge of transformation to provide access to the documented content: The first established set of digital sound processors enabling real-time music signal processing from the 1970s and 1980s became obsolete within about a decade, and most of the technologies developed in the 1990s are no longer in ubiquitous use thirty years later. As musical works from the early decades of digital technologies were often linked to the features of the technology employed, and software was mostly hardware-bound, the technology involved has to be somehow maintained and/or updated to provide accessibility to the (historic) evidence. This comes along with several basic questions: How to document musical works with technology employed? What role does technology play – and what does this mean for the archival approaches? What does it mean for the musical piece to change technology if this is a fundamental element to the work? How strong is the influence of the documentation on future performances (especially regarding the technologies)? In my presentation, I will outline the basic challenges concerning documenting and archiving the technology embedded in musical works and link them to questions concerning performance, expectations, and the challenge of tracking invisible time-based content.

Opportunities and Risks of Digital Exhibitions: Generalizing Access, Reducing Depth?

Martin Siefkes (University of Technology Chemnitz), Julia Pfeiffer (University of Technology Chemnitz)

Digital exhibitionsfundamentally change the way most people interact with artistic and cultural heritage. Arguably, the impact of this change is felt most profoundly by those who have limited access to the GLAM institutions in the first place, either because they live far away from cultural hubs, or because their personal situation doesn’t provide them with sufficient time or economic resources. While we should welcome these developments, there is a price to pay: what is gained in accessibility, may be lost in depth of experience. Is there a danger that our shared cultural heritage becomes just another short-term distraction on the internet, one click away from all the other ‘content’? What is required for a digital exhibition to be both enticing for spontaneous visitors, and to provide adequate tools for experts? While digital exhibitions should not aim to reproduce the ‘hallowed halls’ of traditional museum spaces, can they make up for it with innovative experiences such as interactive visualizations and gamified exploration? These questions, we propose, can and should be investigated empirically. The research project “Digital exhibitions: from typology to reception studies” at TU Chemnitz studies digital exhibitions with a mixed-methods approach, triangulating the results from corpus-based typological investigations and reception studies. Combining methods such as multimodal corpus analysis, eye-tracking of website visits, thinking- aloud, and questionnaires, the project aims to understand what digitisation really does for (or to) our experience of cultural heritage. The basis for this empirical approach is an annotation system tailored for coding most elements on digital exhibition websites, founded on a theoretical perspective inspired by multimodal linguistics. The annotation system provides the bridge between an understanding of digital exhibition websites as multimodal texts with specific communicative functions, and experimental studies of visitors interacting with them.

Living Archives, Precarious Data and Filmic Narrations: The “Regiobiograph” Project 

Georg Vogt (University of Applied Sciences St. Poelten)

The talk presents the research Project Regiobiograph as a model to work with “precarious assets” in local communities and archives.
During the project a prototype was developed that creates narrative filmic montages of digital assets derived from a local archive and displays them in the museums space as a film.  The used datasets are all related to the Jewish community of the Lower Austrian town Groß-Enzersdorf, that is barely addressed in local memory cultures. The created narrations are structured by biographical events.
The presentation will focus on several aspects of the project, starting with the Topotheque as the underlying “living archive”. In the last decade the Topotheques have become a popular platform for local archivists and collaborative collections as they suit citizen science approaches and provide accessible tools. As metadata creation is mostly depended on the editors with nearly no predefined categories, it also showcases specific data bias issues and exclusion politics.
A linked open data approach / media wiki was used to provide an external narrative structure based on biographical information and events. Media assets of the Topotheque can be linked to events in the Wiki, leading to potentially expanding narrations as the archive grows. Those narrations are presented in a narrative form by a prototype situated at the local museum. The talk will contrast the different approaches employed on the projects context and discuss their implications for collecting, debating, and contextualizing precarious assets.

Workshops

Let’s find the Women! Tools for Representing Women’s Amateur Filmmaking in Audiovisual Archive Metadata

Keith M. Johnston (University of East Anglia), Sarah Arnold (Maynooth University), Carolann Madden (Maynooth University)

This workshop stems from findings and actions of the Women in Focus project which sought to identify better mechanisms for representing women’s amateur film works in archival metadata and archive catalogues. Unlike commercial and professional films, amateur films donations often lack detail on filmmakers and contributors. Further, oftentimes film archives use ‘professional’ metadata schemas that focus on roles like ‘director’, ‘producer’ and many amateur films, like home movies, are not best served by such metadata schemas. Our project involved archivists, historians and feminist scholars developing strategies to better represent women’s amateur filmmaking. The project culminated in the Women in Focus toolkit, which we bring to specialist and non-specialist archives, community groups, academics and individual collectors who are concerned with protecting the legacy of those involved in amateur filmmaking. 

This workshop introduces 5 tools that can facilitate better representation and searchability of women’s creative work in catalogues and metadata. Workshop participants will receive a physical copy of the Women in Focus toolkit and have the opportunity to handle amateur films and film ephemera to learn about how women’s filmmaking becomes obscured when appropriate metadata is not captured. Participants will work in groups to learn how to implement the following tools:

  • Donor questionnaire that solicits information on the identity groups that can be captured and represented in metadata;
  • Undertaking expanded film viewing and inspection techniques (e.g. film can notes) that can be included in records;
  • Introducing Agent or Authority Records and Finding Aids, particularly important for amateur films and home movies;
  • Rethinking value judgements associated with certain metadata fields (e.g. ‘director’ ‘producer’); and thinking about keywords and subject headings that can help locate women and other minority groups in catalogues;
  • Leveraging other research sources like online papers and newsletters and oral histories to represent women’s amateur filmmaking.

Cooperation Partners