Frames Cinema Journal

Ask Not What Your Web Can Do For You -

Ask What You Can Do For Your Web! Some
http://framescinemajournal.com

Speculations about Film Studies in the Age

of the Digital Humanities
By Adelheid Heftberger

Freed from the rule of sixteen-seventeen frames per second, free

from the limits of time and space, I put together any given points
in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path
leads to the creation of a fresh perspective of the world. I
decipher in a new way a world unknown to you. [Dziga Vertov
(1984, 1923)]

My focus in this contribution lies primarily on how web-based film studies

can be used for analysis and visualisation. Of course, I am aware of
recent initiatives to make rare footage and documents available online,
(1) or blogs, where film clips are accompanied by insightful articles. (2)
At the same time, I am also familiar with crowd sourced (or expert
sourced) online projects from which valuable information can be
gathered. (3) In my experience, the Internet’s potential lies not only in
sharing information, but also in providing technological tools, often
developed through scholarly initiatives, for others to use. If Film Studies
as a branch of the humanities doesn’t shy away from opening itself up to
scientific methods, inspiring processes can be borrowed and adapted
from other disciplines.

The Digital Humanities may well be hailed as a new set of academic

disciplines that might bring the ‘Two Cultures’ closer. But, in my
experience, there is still a lot of work to do, and much more
communication will be necessary amongst scholars. The following
thoughts and speculations on seven questions of concern to Film Studies
in an age of digital humanities are based on my experiences of working in
a film archive (The Austrian Film Museum, Vienna) and as a researcher in
the interdisciplinary project Digital Formalism. (4)

1. What is ‘traditional’ offline research in Film Studies?

In the beginning was the film. Or, to be more precise, the film event. If
we wanted to define ‘traditional’ offline film studies, we would have to go
back to a time when scholars would sit in the cinema in the dark,
desperately trying to scribble something down in their notebooks. The
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text written Journalwould be based on one’s memory and the ability
afterwards
to decipher one’s notes. Of course, researchers would visit archives to
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study film too, but this was often complicated, and limited by financial
resources and time. In short, access to many films was difficult, and even
if one could gain access, there was rarely a possibility to see each film
more than once. Furthermore, film is a visual medium, so how do you
quote a film in your text? One must rely either on an abundance of words
to describe an image or scene, or on frame enlargements to illustrate the
point being made.

Over time, as access to audiovisual material has become more open, and
the means and skills necessary to manipulate said material more
commonplace, the writings of many film scholars have moved beyond
solely verbal to more visual, or multimedia, forms. The limitations of
having to use only words to describe a film have always been present in
‘traditional’ Film Studies. I would argue that this problem is particularly
prevalent in film history, where the contemporary audience may not
always be familiar with the actors or the setting in question. Often, an
even better way to explain one’s point, and one unsurprisingly quite
frequently used by film scholars, is to produce a video essay. In any case,
the discipline of Film Studies, offline or online, is always based on first
watching the film, and then reading the related written documents –
reviews, biographical information, authors’ notes, charts, and ephemeral
literature, like advertisements, leaflets or posters. What has changed for
the scholar at first glance is the availability and accessibility of his object
of research and, of course, how the results are then published.

2. What’s the material side of it? – Image quality and the artefact

If archives are willing to put their collections online and offer useful tools
for navigation, scholars save time and travel expenses. What is lost,
though, is obviously the possibility of examining the original artefact, for
example, a film print. This is not a film-specific issue, of course, but a
general archival one. In reality, archives will rarely grant permission to
touch originals. Instead, researchers are usually confronted with
reproductions, like copies on microfilm or electronic media. Here, I will
only tackle the issues of digitisation and of implementing standards
within archives, which are nonetheless very important questions. If a
museum or archive wants to open up to scholars and other interested
parties, it needs to make sure that the quality of the images is state of the
art.

As Walter Benjamin argued (Benjamin 1977, 1936), the technical

reproducibility of film is, in contrast to literature or painting, not only an
inextricable part of its nature, but an aspect forced upon it by the need
for mass distribution. What he couldn’t have known, of course, is that film
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reproduction Journal have always led to a loss of image quality (not
processes
just of ‘aura’). It may be a truism to say that digital representation of
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analogue film is a tricky thing in itself: a video image can be heavily
cropped and one can’t always tell from it if its original format was 35mm
or 9.5mm. Some film scholars, and film historians in particular, are
perfectly aware of this problem. One example of it would be to see where
the print is divided into separate reels, which in many cases form
individual narrative units. Such things can only be studied on the artefact
itself. In the Digital Formalism project, the research team was fully
integrated into the archive, so some of that knowledge could be brought
to the table. As our experience on that project has also shown, however,
film scholars and computer scientists are rarely interested enough in a
film’s material qualities and production context. There seems to be a
pervasive tendency to regard film as pure content, as if it watching it on
VHS tape, DVD, as a video file, or a 35mm print made no difference.
Whether this comes from the scholar’s detachment from the processes of
film production, or from being used to watching material more often than
not in a poor quality state, is hard to say.

What will happen in the future as screens become even smaller than
those of our modern laptop-computers or mobile phones is not only a
relevant question for scholars or users, but also for the institutions
planning online projects. Already now one can assume that online videos
are watched mostly on laptops, iPads and iPhones. So how, for example,
can necessary contextual information be provided? How can one make
sure that metadata is linked to the image? Should the original sound even
be added, or is pop-up text an option, if many of the videos will seemingly
be watched in public areas without headphones?

The Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, attacked by film critics for de-
contextualising his documentary material, wasn’t too preoccupied with
metadata. He defended himself by explaining how he regarded museums
and archives as the correct place to store information about film material
in the form of documents for editors, which could serve as a kind of guide
to the correct ‘editing route’. As he wrote,

The allegation is false that a fact taken from life, when recorded
by the camera loses the right to be called a fact if its name, date,
place, and number are not inscribed on the film. Every instant of
life shot unstaged, every individual frame shot just as it is in life
with a hidden camera, ‘caught unawares’, or by some other
analogous technique – represents a fact recorded on film, a film-
fact as we call it. […] It would be completely absurd to try to have
each individual shot (as a general rule) answer an entire
questionnaire: where, when, why, date of birth, family situation,
etc. [Vertov 1984, 1926: 57]
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We can hardly disagree with the filmmaker’s point of view, and it is not
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my intention to quote an artist to prove that film clips don’t require
metadata and contextualization. However, the quotation does serve to
show that, already in the 1920s, film images alone couldn’t be trusted as
hard evidence, and that there was an awareness that images without
context could be prone to misinterpretation.

3. Where do we study film? – The cinema auditorium versus the

laptop

So we don’t need movie theatres any more as the sole place where we
can see the objects of our studies. On our laptops we are free to decide
when, at what speed, whether to watch from beginning to end, or just
jump to the bits we need to see. This process of course had already begun
with home video, but now we can skip instantaneously over several
minutes (or even hours) of content, or watch different films in multiple
windows on a single screen. Already the process of watching several films
at the same time might be considered a visualisation, and therefore
already inspire our scholarly hypotheses by a simply comparison of the
images and montage patterns.

In addition to ordinary DVDs, containing a sole work or film, there are

also scholarly editions on the market, which provide us with metadata in
the form of annotated commentaries. (5) The Russian Hyperkino edition is
one of the most ambitious attempts to publish film classics with
‘footnotes’. (6) Useful Online-Editions of films can also be found: in May
2012, for example, the Austrian Film Museum published the earliest
works of Dziga Vertov, providing both the films in digital form and
translations of the Russian intertitles in German and English. (7)

A related, and very interesting initiative, this time in online film

scholarship, is the Film-Educational Film archive (from the German
filmvermittelnder Film) set up by German film and media scholars in
recent years. This web-based database collects examples of, links to, and
comprehensive information about films made by filmmakers about other
films and filmmakers. As Michael Baute and Volker Pantenburg, the
scholars involved in this project, have written:

These films […] follow a certain purpose. They want to illustrate,

explain, ‘mediate’ what film and cinema are, how they function
and what they do. These are films that have learned from other
films and want to pass on what they have learned. [Baute and
Pantenburg 2007]. (8)

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Baute and Cinema Journal project is part of a much larger, international
Pantenburg’s
movement by film scholars and archivists. Often going by different
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names, (video essays, audiovisual film studies, videographic film studies
or DVD essays), these digital works, which are increasingly published
online, are both informative and have their own aesthetic value as well.

As the initiatives described above show us, digital media offer us tools to
navigate or rearrange images, enabling us to break up the narrative and
continuity of a filmic work. Instead of one screen and one timeline, we
now have several screens of various sizes – but equal significance – that
display a multitude of different images simultaneously. Metadata can be
searched using a database. Information relating to shot length or framing
can theoretically be computed and visualised, thus forgoing the film
image entirely. It’s possible to jump in and out of films, read comments
connected to certain scenes or to one aspect at the same time, watch a
related video on the same website or navigate through a film like an
image-database. Film has become a true ‘time-based art’ for the audience
as well as the scholar.

But I would argue that, even if the Internet is a great place to study and
analyse film, it should not be the only place where we watch films. Film
museums and cinematheques, like the Austrian Film Museum, regard the
screening room still as the right and historically correct place for the film
event. But it is certainly the case that he arrival of digital technology has
now fundamentally challenged both the cinema and the film archive. (9)

4. What are we talking about when we talk about data? –

Communication between humanities and computer sciences

The digital archivist Trevor Owens argues that regarding research

objects as data is not as alien to humanities scholars as it may seem and
suggests a number of ways in which they can use already existing
methods:

We can choose to treat data as different kinds of things. First, as

constructed things, data are a species of artefact. Second, as
authored objects created for particular audiences, data can be
interpreted as texts. Third, as computer-processable information,
data can be computed in a whole host of ways to generate novel
artefacts and texts which are then open to subsequent
interpretation and analysis. Which brings us to evidence. Each of
these approaches – data as text, artefact, and processable
information – allow one to produce or uncover evidence that can
support particular claims and arguments. Data is not in and of
itself of evidence but a multifaceted object which can be mobilized
as evidence in support of an argument (Owens 2012).
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I believe that there is still a lack of knowledge among humanities scholars
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when they talk about ‘data’. ‘If film scholars try to be understood by
machines’, was the title of one of the articles published within the Digital
Formalism project (Fuxjäger 2009). What we can see at work here is not
only a continuation of the well-known stereotype of the old-fashioned film
scholar, usually buried in his analogue paper archive, but now trying to
communicate with the somehow illiterate computer. It also reveals in one
sentence, perhaps more subconsciously than consciously, one of the core
problems of interdisciplinary projects.

One of the specialists in this field, Elijah Meeks from Stanford University,
quotes a comment made by a graduate student, who felt ‘that oftentimes
collaboration with computer scientists felt more like colonization by
computer scientists’ (Meeks 2011). He argues that ‘wholesale importation
of digital tools, techniques and objects into humanities scholarship tends
to foster a situation where rich, sophisticated problems are contracted to
fit conveniently into software’ (Meeks 2011). Also the author, visual
theorist and artist, Johanna Drucker, sees a lack of, ‘humanities principles
developed in hard-fought critical battles of the last decades’, and defines
those as:

the subjectivity of interpretation, theoretical conceptions of texts

as events (not things), cross-cultural perspectives that reveal the
ideological workings of power, recognition of the fundamentally
social nature of knowledge production, an intersubjective,
mediated model of knowledge as something constituted, not just
transmitted. For too long, the digital humanities, the advanced
research arm of humanistic scholarly dialogue with computational
methods, has taken its rules and cues from digital exigencies.
[Drucker 2009]

Questions of the extent to which art is even allowed to be rationalised, or

quantified, are still discussed, and are still problematic, as film and media
scholar Barbara Flückiger sets out:

If and how aesthetic objects can or should be measured, is part of

the debate on basic principles. Whoever wants to dissect the
peculiar haziness of all artistic works into measurable units makes
himself easily suspicious of reductionist positivism. Regardless of
the long line of attempts, dating back to the turn of the 20th
century, to base philosophical aesthetics on empiric-scientific
grounds […], there seems to still be a conflict between empiricism
and aesthetics, which is difficult to overcome. [Flückiger 2011:
44]
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Consequently, as I have gathered from my own experience, starting a
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project involving computer scientists, humanities scholars and archivists,
requires a clear idea of the different vocabularies and methods, research
goals and publication practises. The humanities, in particular, might face
the problem of not being able to produce ‘clear’ and ‘computational’ tasks
for the computer scientist to solve. Or, as Drucker suggests, it is an
intrinsic part of their discipline to be not one-, but multi-dimensional.
Although it may sound like common sense, I nonetheless intuit that the
different disciplines might not be ‘open’ enough to interoperate as they
should and could. Returning to the title of Anton Fuxjäger’s article, I’d
like to state that it still isn’t the machines to which we have to make
ourselves understood, but our fellow researchers.

5. What can we analyse in film? – Editing as an example

The above doesn’t mean, though, that discrete data can’t be retrieved
from literature or filmic works. On the contrary, this mission has been a
part of literature or film studies since the 1920s. In the Digital Formalism
project we took our starting point from the school of Russian formalism
and the texts written by influential scholars like Boris Ėjchenbaum, Jurij
Tynjanov or Viktor Šklovskij, to name just some of them. (10) Transcripts
and notations by filmmakers can be read, as film scholar Barbara Wurm
argues, as practices between personal style and techniques determined
by historic-cultural grounds, which disclose a form of ‘tacit knowledge’
(Wurm 2009). Vertov himself wrote:

A kinok who has conceived a film epic or fragment should be able

to jot it down with precision so as to give it life on the screen,
should favourable technical conditions be present. The most
complete scenario cannot, of course, replace these notes, just as a
libretto does not replace pantomime, just as literary accounts of
Scriabin’s compositions do not convey any notion of his music. To
represent a dynamic study on a sheet of paper, we need graphic
symbols of movement. [Vertov 1984, 1922: 9] (11)

The film scholar and film historian Yuri Tsivian, founder of Cinemetrics,
(12) draws film scholars’ attention to the fact that film is a quantifiable
medium. He considers editing the ‘only artistic technique born and
developed within the medium itself’, and invites scholars to see the
rational side of film studies: ‘We know a good deal about theories of
editing (mainly from Soviet montage theories of the twenties), but,
ironically, what we normally hear about editing as a practice amounts to
a handful of famous examples taken up from these theories.

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There isCinema
a reasonJournal
for this. Studying editing is not an easy matter. Editors
are like tailors; before they cut, they measure. Footages and meters are
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staples of cutting-room talk. In this sense editing can be said to be an
exact art, and not every student of film history is ready or eager to
masquerade as a scientist. In addition, film scholars are more used to
working at a desk or in a film viewing hall than they are at an editing
table provided with a frame counter’ (Tsivian 2008: 765). Among the
Internet platforms dedicated to measuring and analysing film,
Cinemetrics is without doubt the most thriving. One can hypothesize that
the reason for this lies in the fact that the Internet basically works
according to unwritten ‘offline’ rules. The popularity of such websites is
due either to their being hosted by renowned scholars, who can draw
many students and peers in, or to being linked to well-known and
respected universities or institutions.

6. What can we ask from data? – Explaining is analysis

It is not only the case, obviously, that Russian Avant-garde or highly

formalized films, like the metric films of the Austrian filmmakers Kurt
Kren and Peter Kubelka, can be subjected to film analysis. But what do
we want to achieve or unveil in film analysis anyway, be it online or
offline, computer aided or manually annotated? With regard to the Digital
Formalism project, it could be noted that the technologies of computer
science, data mining or visualisation are sometimes at a loss without film
scholars and film historians first asking questions.

I do not want to assume that this is the case in every project of this kind,
and it’s certainly not the case in the USA or in the UK, where special
university courses in the field of Digital Humanities have been started.
(13) But some answers to this highly relevant question can be found in
the writings of film scholar David Bordwell, who understands analysis
also to mean ‘explaining’ to some degree. As he wrote in 2000:

Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole phenomena into

relevant parts and showing how they work together. Thus a film
historian interested in how a particular studio worked in 1930 will
distinguish among the studio’s operations (studio departments,
say, or phases of the moviemaking process). An academic film
critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, ‘acts’) to see
how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also
involves describing it. A film historian trying to explain how a
studio functioned in 1930 will describe the work routines; that’s a
necessary part of the explanation. An academic film critic will
describe a scene in detail, for that’s necessary to understanding
why it carries a particular meaning or achieves a particular effect.
Analysis and description are rare in ordinary conversation and in
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Cinema Journal
reviewing because of limits of time and space, but also
because the film scholar is interested in something that isn’t so
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pressing for other parties: explanations. [Bordwell 2000]

In addition, it is certainly helpful to consider the following statements by

Bordwell as a list of possible questions we can pose to filmic works:

There are distinct types of explanation in film history. A standard

list would include: biographical history: focusing on an
individual’s life history; industrial or economic history: focusing
on business practices; aesthetic history: focusing on film art
(form, style, genre); technological history: focusing on the
materials and machines of film; social/cultural/political history:
focusing on the role of cinema in the larger society. [Bordwell
2008]

7. Online Film Studies in the future?

It may be still true that, in Europe, hermeneutic traditions are very much
alive. Therefore it’s generally still hard for humanities and computer
sciences to get joint, mutually beneficial projects started. I don’t think
that research funding is the main hindrance for not submitting proposals
for interdisciplinary projects, however. In the case of Digital Formalism,
the project received money because of its interdisciplinary approach. Yet
one of the most problematic topics was how and where to publish the
results of the research. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was especially difficult
for the computer sciences to find the right venues among their peers. The
traditions in the different disciplines still seem firmly established and are
not easily bridged, which applies both to the targeted journals as to the
publication types (in print or online).

For me, the big potential of web-based film studies lies in the cross-
linking of different analytical methods and approaches. To my eyes,
simple online presentations of video material already invite us to compare
and analyse different content simultaneously rather than just view each
video one after another. The opportunity granted by having a large
amount of images available enables new hypotheses and research
questions, and opens up new ways of processing visual information. The
analysis of mass data (macro studies) as well as investigations into a
small corpus of works, or even one single work (micro studies), is aided
by recent, specially developed software. (14) What we need is both a
powerful infrastructure to help us view the videos and generate data, and
free software to analyse and visualise it. Also, more attention has to be
paid to working with ‘good’ data. This involves the way data is produced
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(digitisation) Journal
as well as the quality of the files available online
(compression) and clean metadata. This is where archivists have to offer
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their expertise, from handling of analogue prints, to scanning, image
retouching and database work.

One of the shortcomings of projects with a strong media and Internet

focus is that not enough thought is given to the afterlife of the project.
Who will host the web address and administer the content, for example?
The usual procedure would be to shut down the site, but then the
information will be lost to everyone. When we, in Digital Formalism,
toyed with the idea of publishing the results of the project on a dedicated
website, there was reasonable doubt about the ongoing impact. In the
end, a book was published, which shows how strong traditions are still
intact in the academic world, making true innovation difficult. Well-
established and well-funded institutions, like universities, have more
options to explore here than they might think.

But even the best tools provided on the Internet will not solve the
problem of posing useful questions. Some of the miscommunication
between film scholars and computer scientists in interdisciplinary
projects like Digital Formalism may stem from the fact that there isn’t yet
enough training in computation and data mining in the humanities. While
digital humanities tools have already been developed in literature studies,
in film studies there still seems to be little initiative. Furthermore, the
roles allocated in interdisciplinary projects still have the humanities
scholars posing the questions and the computer scientists answering
them. This limits collaboration and, most of all, prevents a real exchange
of methods and ideas. Film Studies should be regarded as a collective
undertaking per se, based on technical and commercial standards. In
addition, we will all have to learn from other disciplines to fully
implement statistical approaches, film history, audiovisual techniques,
data visualisation and basic informatics fully within Film Studies. Only
then will the Web, and other digital infrastructures, become truly useful
for Film Studies, providing inspiring, international networks for
dissemination, participation and sharing.

Endnotes:

(1) Archives and archival projects have been quite active in their efforts
to put material online. For more information see, for example, European
Film Gateway or European Film Treasures.

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(2) See, for example, The Bioscope blog.

(3) See, for example, the Silent Comedy Mafia website, or the Lost Films
project.

(4) Digital Formalism was a three-year interdisciplinary project

(2007–2011) with a focus on the films by the Russian documentarist and
avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov. It was a joint effort of archivists,
film scholars and computer scientists. For more information see the
project publication: Klemens Gruber, Barbara Wurm, Vera Kropf (eds.),
Digital Formalism. Die kalkulierten Bilder des Dziga Vertov (Vienna,
Cologne, Weimar: Maske & Kothurn, Issue 55, No. 3, 2009). For more
information on results, especially on how film data was prepared and
visualized, see: Heftberger, Adelheid, ‘Do Computers Dream of Cinema?
Film Data for Computer Analysis and Visualisation’, In David M. Berry
(ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (London, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), and Heftberger, Adelheid, ‘Zerschnittene Bilder. Die
drei Fassungen von Dziga Vertovs Tri pesni o Lenine (1934/35, 1938 und
1970)’, In Georg Gierzinger, Sylvia Hölzl, Christine Roner (eds.),
Spielformen der Macht. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Macht im
Rahmen junger slawistischer Forschung (Innsbruck: Innsbruck university
press, 2011), 259–275). See also the contribution by Matthias
Zeppelzauer, Dalibor Mitrović and Christian Breiteneder in this journal.

(5) Although the publication is by now somewhat out of date, it still

documents the thoughts and discussions on DVD and digitization at the
beginning of the 21st century: Loiperdinger, Martin (ed.), Celluloid goes
Digital. Historical-Critical Editions of Films on DVD and the Internet
(Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002).

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(6) For more information on Hyperkino, see:
http://hyperkino.net/hyperkino/What-is-HYPERKINO.

(7) See the official website of the Austrian Film Museum. Online at:
http://www.filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/filmmuseum/main.jart?rel=de&conte
nt-id=1332768087863&reserve-mode=active.

(8) In addition, the two scholars have carried out more in-depth research
into montage and image composition, the results of which are available
on their website. See: http://www.kunst-der-vermittlung.de/dossiers/verfa
hren-des-filmvermittelnden-films/look-at-the-way-he-rides/. More on film
education and why it is linked to the cinema can be found in issue No. 13
(forthcoming July 2012) of the internet journal Nach dem Film (After the
film) and especially in the article by Alejandro Bachmann, ‘Zug fahren.
Filmvermittlung im Kontext des Filmmuseums’. Online
at: http://www.nachdemfilm.de/.

(9) One could argue that film has never really needed the screening room.
Benjamin wasn’t alone in asking if film should be regarded as a mass art.
I’d also like to quote one of the most influential Russian formalist scholars
of the 1920’s, Boris Ėjchenbaum, who questions the mass character of
film altogether. In his eyes, the mass aspect, which is responsible for
cinema’s success, is not a feature of the film itself but rather due to its
historical circumstances. He argued that film doesn’t need the viewer,
like the theatre actor does. Anyone could just watch with a projector at
home and still be part of the mass of film viewers. Furthermore, ‘we
basically don’t even feel part of a crowd when we sit in the cinema room
[…] the conditions under which the screening is taking place, leads to the
feeling of complete isolation in the viewer, which constitutes one of the
special psychological attractions in the reception of films’ (Ėjchenbaum
2005, 1927: 27). Although Ėjchenbaum doesn’t express this completely
clearly, he rightly noticed that we watch films in the cinema only because
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the film Cinema
industryJournal
needs a mass audience to recoup the expense of film
production. As one of the most vocal voices for the other point of view, I’d
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like to draw attention to a presentation given by Alexander Horwath, the
director of the Austrian Film Museum, at the Cinématèque Française in
Paris in October 2010. For a video recording of the complete presentation
visit canalu.tv.

(10) For an English translation of ‘Poėtika kino’, the most important

anthology of essays by Russian formalists on cinema see: Taylor, Richard
(ed.), The Poetics of Cinema (Russian Poetics in Translation Vol. 9: The
Poetics of Cinema) (Oxford, 1982).

(11) A kinok was a member of Vertov’s group (kino+oko [eye]), and was
defined as someone who worked according to Vertov’s Kinoglaz method.
For Vertov’s own manifestos and articles explaining this concept in
English, see: Annette Michelson (ed.), Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga
Vertov (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

(12) This Internet platform still gathers data from many contributors all
over the world and is constantly developing new tools to enable everyone
to study and analyze the data collected. See: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/.
Interestingly there is also another project online with the same name and
also worth looking into with regard to visualisation:
http://cinemetrics.fredericbrodbeck.de/.

(13) Lisa Spiro, one of the pioneers in the field, gives a comprehensive
overview of initiatives: online at
http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/getting-started-in-the-
digital-humanities/.

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(14) The media scholar, artist and computer scientist Lev Manovich
develops tools for the analysis of large datasets and visualisation software
at Software Studies Initiative in San Diego. For more information see:
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/ and http://manovich.net/.

References:

Baute, Michael, Volker Pantenburg, ‘Look at the way he rides with his
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Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02, this article © Adelheid
Heftberger

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