Digital Humanities and Film Studies

Abstract

Vertovians who form a special circle within that of scholarship and became my friends over the course of time. To these belong, in the first rank, not only Aleksandr Derjabin, John MacKay and Yuri Tsivian but also my project partners Michael Loebenstein, Thomas Tode, Georg Wasner and Barbara Vockenhuber, as well as Matthias Zeppelzauer, Dalibor Mitrović and Maia Zaharieva. My sincere thanks go to Lev Manovich for the inspiring collaboration and support in creating the visualisations. My heartfelt thanks to the Slavic scholars Eva Binder, Natascha Drubek and Barbara Wurm, who were always ready and willing to give me information in response to questions both small and large. No less hearty are my thanks to my colleagues in Russia, who excel in both their comprehensive knowledge of film history and their readiness to be of assistance, Peter Bagrov, Nikolai Izvolov, Sergei Kapterev and Naum Kleiman, as well as to the archive staff in Russia for their willingness to provide information at short notice and the access to research materials and for their encouragement: Elena Kolikova (RGAKFD), Valerij Bosenko (GFF, died 2013) and Oleg Bočkov (GFF). For stimulating conversations on various topics, my special thanks go to

Creanalytics: Automating the supercut as a form of critical technical practice

“…Relational-analytic methods build on previous work in quantitative film studies (Salt, 1974;Tsivian, 2009;Butler, 2014;Baxter, 2014), complementing classical statistical approaches with recent data science techniques. This also echoes existing work in the broader field of digital humanities, traditionally more focused on text and canonical artefacts than on popular audiovisual culture, but that is increasingly contributing scholarship about films and television analysed through computer vision technologies (Estrada et al, 2017;Heftberger, 2018;Mittell, 2019Mittell, , 2021Olesen, 2017;Smits and Wevers, 2022;Wevers and Smits, 2020).…”

Rethinking multimodal corpora from the perspective of Peircean semiotics

“…The rapidly expanding field of digital humanities now regularly engages with visual or multimodal materials, which often involves combining methods developed in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning for enriching and exploring large volumes of data (Smits and Wevers, 2023). In addition to methodological explorations that have applied specific computational techniques to different media that range from film (Heftberger, 2018) to photography (Smits and Ros, 2023) and magic lantern slides (Smits and Kestemont, 2021) to mention just a few examples, recent research has sought to couch the application of computational methods to visual and multimodal materials within broader theoretical frameworks, such as the one proposed for "distant viewing" by Tilton (2019, 2023). These efforts have also attracted the attention of multimodality researchers, who have argued that computational approaches to multimodal data in digital humanities would benefit from input from relevant theories of multimodality, which can provide the methodological tools needed for pulling apart the diverse materialities and artifacts studied (Bateman, 2017) and annotation schemes required for contextualizing the results of computational analyses (Hiippala, 2021).…”

A Doubtful Handshake: The Promising Frontier of Data-Driven Film and Media Studies

“…These are attempts that had already been anticipated by some previous experiments, but that began to gain some diffusion from the mid-1970s. Think of the analysis of average shot length to investigate the stylistic signatures of films directed by different directors, or to survey cutting rates in different periods of film history (e.g., the 1940s and 1950s) (Salt 1974, 1983, Tsivian 2009, Heftberger 2018, see also Bordwell 2006). Similar quantitative analyses, as well as those on the scale of shot and camera movement, have been carried out for decades, literally manually, without recourse to automated tools.…”