Understanding Visual Culture through Silent Film Collections
FAIN: HAA-263803-19
Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH 03755-1808)
Mark J. Williams (Project Director: June 2018 to present)
John P. Bell (Co Project Director: November 2018 to present)
The creation of a large-scale compendium and research platform for silent films that are currently housed in separate collections and a suite of tools to be used by scholars studying the transition of visual culture from stage to screen.
This Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant project aims to produce a digital compendium of over 400 films from the silent film era that document the transition of visual culture from stage to screen. It will combine highly-influential and rare works archived in the Paper Print collection of pre-1930 cinema at The Library of Congress with films at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam to create a digital resource designed for film scholars around the world. The compendium will be built by merging two pieces of software: The Media Ecology Project's Semantic Annotation Tool and the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture's Scalar. The resulting platform will provide an open software and data framework scholars can use to compare disparate types of data in a single interface. This valuable tool will unite a wide and growing variety of data and invite scholars to gather and post ideas, asking and answering new questions about key historical features in the evolution of motion pictures.
Media Coverage
Mark Williams Is on a Mission to Preserve Visual Culture (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Hannah Silverstein
Publication: Dartmouth News
Date: 3/14/2019
URL: https://news.dartmouth.edu/news/2019/03/mark-williams-mission-preserve-visual-culture
Associated Products
Symposium on Digital Tools for Moving Image Analysis (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Symposium on Digital Tools for Moving Image Analysis
Author: John Bell
Author: Mark Williams
Abstract: The Neukom Institute for Computational Science &
The Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth Present
Digital Tools for Moving Image Analysis Symposium
May 8-10, 2019
This three-day symposium brings together scholars, librarians, archivists, and technologists to discuss current computational methods of research on video and film and brainstorm about future interdisciplinary research. Participants will discuss current research tools and methods for time-based markup of moving images, formal analysis of film properties, machine learning software for object classification and facial tagging, and linguistic analysis of media paratext. This symposium is an extension of two NEH-funded projects underway at MEP: The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage project and the Paper Print and Biograph Compendium.
Date Range: May 8-10, 2019
Location: Dartmouth College
Primary URL:
http://mediaecology.dartmouth.edu/wp/archives/624Primary URL Description: Digital Tools for Moving Image Analysis Symposium
May 8-10, 2019
This three-day symposium brings together scholars, librarians, archivists, and technologists to discuss current computational methods of research on video and film and brainstorm about future interdisciplinary research. Participants will discuss current research tools and methods for time-based markup of moving images, formal analysis of film properties, machine learning software for object classification and facial tagging, and linguistic analysis of media paratext. This symposium is an extension of two NEH-funded projects underway at MEP: The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage project and the Paper Print and Biograph Compendium.