Guest Editors' Foreword: Digital Humanities and/in Film archives

The continuous redefinition of the role and purview of archivists and curators of moving image media has been driven, in no small measure, by the development of digital tools and networks. To better understand this shift and start mapping its current impact on archives and film preservation, this special issue of The Moving Image assembles perspectives from leading curators, archivists, academics, and digital humanists who have developed innovative platforms to disseminate the work done in moving image archival collections. They provide new tools and resources for both research and pedagogy, share best practices, discuss opportunities for collaboration, and address challenges from leading digital humanities (DH) projects in the audiovisual archival field.

Most of these projects are still in progress, so the reader will find that this collection of feature articles and Forum pieces signals the current developing status—or "iterative" nature, to quote Charles Tepperman—of the digital humanities. The contributions compellingly reflect the state of the field, while still leaving open critical questions for future discussion. One such question is certainly whether DH methodologies and tools advance new epistemologies and practices for research in film and media studies and in archival moving image collections. While our contributors reject the idea that by incorporating (partially) automated tasks, DH methodologies lend increased scientific credibility to media analyses and histories, they all highlight the heuristic value of its applications. As the articles in this special issue emphasize, many of the tasks involved in DH projects (creating a database, segmenting a film sequence, annotating, selecting variables, etc.) in fact force us to interrogate established vocabularies, prompting us once more to (re)define, for instance, "race film," a film "shot," or an "archival record." The digital humanities, as these examples show, encourage interinstitutional and interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars and archivists, inviting them to open up the results of their work to awareness, criticism, and debate.

Particular focus is placed on outreach initiatives that give access and visibility to nonfiction, amateur, and nontheatrical film: programming, platforms for user-contributed content, crowdsourcing, and original ways of annotating, sharing, and cross-referencing time-based media. We also address pedagogy that utilizes primary sources, facilitates (under)graduate research, and encourages broader stakeholders, such as K–12 instruction and local and community-based organizations.

Shane O'Sullivan approaches these goals by exploring institutional projects that in the last fifteen years have granted access to British audiovisual archival materials for education. O'Sullivan particularly concentrates on the pioneering work of current British Film Institute (BFI) head of education Paul Gerhardt and the collaboration between the BFI and Kingston University on a pedagogical project teaching students to reuse moving image archive material in video essays.

Philipp Dominik Keidl expands a thorough consideration of the exhibition strategies of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne into a broader consideration of what media archaeological thinking and practices can mean outside the purview of academia, specifically as enabled by digital technologies and environments. An expanded and crucially public iteration of media archeology can stand as an equal partner and generator of discourse that leads to more conceptual contributions to film and media history.

Liliana Melgar Estrada, Eva Hielscher, Marijn Koolen, Christian Gosvig Olesen, Julia Noordegraaf, and Jaap Blom collaboratively survey different video annotation and editing tools widely used in media studies and production. The authors examine two kinds of video software, ELAN and NVivo, to analyze a sequence from People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak et al., 1930). They assess the advantages and drawbacks of each, along with the larger implications for moving image scholars, professionals, and archivists.

What would a digital humanities approach to film colors look like? In answering this question, Barbara Flueckiger reflects on the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors project at the University of Zurich, an extension of one of the best-known DH projects to deal with film history, the Timeline of Historical Film Colors. With computer-assisted tools, such as video annotation and a database of color patterns from a wide array of films, FilmColors aims to merge quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate what a...