Marina Hassapopoulou
Thursdays, 1-5pm
Room 635
4 points
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) // Class #23500
Section 002 (Outside students) // Class #23501
This new course will explore Cinema Studies within the interdisciplinary context of the Digital Humanities (DH). Students will study and create projects at the intersection of computing and Humanities research. Digital tools and platforms, along with the databases they create, have expanded the ways we study moving images and filmmaking traditions.
Despite Cinema Studies’ important contributions to the expansion of DH, the study of moving images and time-based media is usually not at the forefront of DH-related inquiry. One of the course objectives is to therefore place Cinema Studies research at the center of DH methodologies in order to diversify interdisciplinary approaches to both DH and Cinema Studies. In this course, students will study DH practice alongside related theoretical frameworks in order to explore the profound historiographical, philosophical, sociocultural, and institutional imperatives that drive the need for digital tools and computational methods in the study of moving images. This approach will help students establish in-depth connections between theory and practice, and will assist them in planning, prototyping, and creating their own final projects to address significant research questions related to Cinema Studies and other fields.
Part I of the course will focus on a historical and critical exploration of pre-digital and early digital Cinema Studies projects that prefigure the interactive, data-driven, cartographic, and/or computational logic of current DH tools. We will cover a broad historical range of critical making that includes the works of early film theorists-practitioners (such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein), collaborations between computer scientists and artists (including the Bell Labs 1960s experiments), as well as more recent digital projects and tools (Yuri Tsivian, Anne Friedberg, Marsha Kinder, Steve F. Anderson, Stephen Mamber, and many others). In addition, Part I of the course will analyze DH projects that contribute to a relatively new subfield in Cinema Studies: “new cinema history,” which refers to a cluster of new methodologies and digital tools for studying the cultural and social history of cinema and its audiences. We will explore the impact of this new cinema history and of “distant reading” (the collection and computational/statistical analysis of large amounts of text data, rather than the close reading of individual texts) on traditional methodologies in Cinema Studies, through the work of influential DHers such as Deb Verhoeven, Richard Maltby, and Jeffrey Klenotic. Our analysis of these projects will not only focus on technical and methodological aspects, but also on the intellectual, cultural, ethical, and institutional debates regarding the use of digital tools in the Humanities.
Part II of the course will provide hands-on DH training through workshops that will introduce students to a variety of DH tools and platforms, including data visualization, text mining, mapping, annotations, digital archiving, collaborative authoring, film forensics, volumetrics, interactive design, databases, and critical remixing. The workshops will help students acquire a diverse set of skills for analyzing moving images, and will provide them with tools to use in their final projects and other class activities. Final project options include: conceptualizing and designing new analytical tools, creating new platforms for the digital analysis of moving images, using existing DH tools for a new project, critically remixing archival material, contributing content to an existing DH initiative, producing multimedia scholarship (including videographic work), or using an online authoring platform (such as Scalar, Omeka, or StoryMaps) for an academic research paper.
Course assignments will include short response papers (part I of the course), presentations (I & II), software reviews (II), prototype design or project outline (II), and a final project (II). The course is suitable for all levels of technical expertise.