I’d like to propose a session to bring together any cinema studies people who are at this THATCamp, to explore how digital humanities methods are being used and supported in the analysis of film/video. Some people refer to it as quantitative film studies or cinemetrics in projects like:
- The Cinemetrics database www.cinemetrics.lv/
We might also look at different visualization projects:
- Movie Barcode moviebarcode.tumblr.com/
- Frederic Brodbeck’s “fingerprint” of a film cinemetrics.fredericbrodbeck.de/
Last year Miriam Posner and Jason Mittell led a workshop at the SCMS Conference (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) to interrogate the intersection between digital humanities and cinema/media studies (miriamposner.com/blog/?p=1239). Some of the questions posed are:
- Where do the two fields converge, and what are their differences?
- Is a digital humanist ipso facto a media scholar, or do the two fields present different criteria for entry?
- Media scholars are particularly adept at analyzing cultural representations, such as of race and gender. Might media scholars bring some of these strengths to digital humanities?
- Many media scholars are interested in issues of reception and audience studies. How might such subfields engage with digital humanities?
- What might media studies offer to digital humanities, and vice versa?
- Conversely, do the two fields possess epistemological or methodological contradictions?
- How might the growing interest in digital humanities alter the field of film and media studies?
I’d like to build off of this and turn it around into a maker session, where we compile links to projects/resources/publications (existing or ideal) that together could form a primer for cinema scholars/critics/enthusiasts/whatever to start exploring DH.
