Staff and researchers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) are eagerly anticipating some well-deserved time in the coming weeks and holiday breaks to explore latest advancements in historiography and digital humanities approaches for studying early cinema. We believe that the original records of creators, especially in drama and audiovisual media, are crucial gateways to understanding American culture. With this in mind, the team at WCFTR is particularly excited to explore the new special issue of the Journal of e-Media Studies, “Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections,” edited by Mark Williams. This special issue promises to offer valuable perspectives and case studies on early cinema research. This rich collection of essays by prominent film and media scholars provides valuable insights into historical research of early cinema through the lens of digital humanities tools and techniques.
This special issue is the culmination of years of work on the Media Ecology Project (MEP) at Dartmouth College, directed by Prof. Mark Williams. The MEP is a digital lab that grants researchers access to archival moving image collections and facilitates the contribution of critical analysis back to the archival and research communities. By bridging technical, disciplinary, and epistemological boundaries, the MEP enhances our understanding of historical media.
The MEP has developed several innovative digital tools that are instrumental in ongoing scholarship about archival moving image materials. These include the Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), Onomy.org, and a cut-detector tool that identifies ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ cuts. Another project of the MEP is the Early Cinema Compendium, which collates resources for Early Cinema studies. Each of these tools support detailed textual analysis of moving pictures through time-based annotations, making them versatile for various research and analysis purposes. Several essays are directly related to materials collected for MEP research, while others highlight non-U.S. and non-Western research in film history, showcasing the global reach of early cinema studies.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction to Special Issue on Early Cinema History (Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections) by Mark Williams
- New Windows on the World by Ian Christie
- Early Cinema and the Historiographic Impulse: Scholarly Positionality Then and Now by Charles Musser
- Seeing through the Haverstraw Tunnel by Dan Streible
- Learning to See on the Screen: Exploring Female Performance in Early Film through the Media Ecology Project by Victoria Duckett
- Annotating FloLo: How the Media Ecology Project Fostered Early Cinema Performance Analysis and Collaborative Research by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski
- Action and Acting at Biograph Studio, 1908-1912 by Daria Khitrova and Yuri Tsivian
- Silent Era Motion Picture Camera Operators by Marsha Gordon and Buckey Grimm
- Two Ways of Memory: The Signal Corps and CBS World War I Motion Picture Collections at the National Archives by Bret Vukoder
- The Biograph Project by Tracey Goessel
- Silent Films and Augmented Reality by Matthew Lewis
- Daydreams: Cinema of the Russian Empire and Beyond, a Database by Anna Kovalova
- Between Naïveté and Desire: Analyzing Collective Intimacy in Sun Yu’s Films with a Time-based Annotation Tool by Yuqian Yan
- Photographs in Films Starring Ruan Lingyu: Considering Geometric Regions of the Motion Picture Frame by Panpan Yang
- Metadata and the Media Ecology Project by Shiyang Jiang
- Finding One American Beauty: Deyo and Deyo (1897) by Dan Streible
By providing access to advanced digital tools and fostering a collaborative research environment, the Media Ecology Project and the insights from this special issue will contribute to ongoing research in film history. These resources enable scholars to conduct more nuanced and comprehensive analyses, paving the way for new discoveries and a deeper understanding of early cinema.
Contributing institutions to the Compendium include the AFI, Library of Congress, NARA, MoMA, Seaver Center at Natural History Museum in LA, EYE Filmmuseum, Women Film Pioneers Project, Film Preservation Society, Sherman Grinberg Library, plus Charles Musser, Thomas Gunning, Buckey Grimm, Panpan Yang, Yuqian Yan, Anna Kovalova, and the late Paul Spehr, to whom the Early Cinema Compendium and its associated Special Issue of the Journal of e-Media Studies are dedicated.
You can read more about the MEP at its website: https://mediaecology.dartmouth.edu/wp/
The special issue of The Journal of e-Media Studies is available open-access at: https://pub.dartmouth.edu/journal-of-e-media-studies-vol-7-issue-1-early-cinema-compendium/index