Projects

Programs with the Media Ecology Project

Under the direction of Professor Mark J. Williams, I co-manage two programs within Dartmouth’s Media Ecology Project, covering the global USIA motion picture archive and the National Archives’ World War I collections. The Media Ecology Project (MEP) employs a “virtuous cycle” in which scholars access digitized films and perform close readings, collectively producing time-based annotations and generating searchable metadata to aid the navigation and research of the archives. Within the dynamic publishing platform, Scalar, we use the (newly developed) Semantic Annotation Tool to create time-based and spatial annotations (which become searchable across all the films). Through ononomy.org, we seek to develop familiar terminologies/grammars for the archives, also making the annotations readily translatable across multiple languages. Our USIA project was recently awarded a Collaborative Research grant from the National Endowment for Humanities. With a team of twelve international scholars, we will create and provide six regionally-focused workshops and a small compendium, introducing new researchers to USIA motion pictures and the  MEP’s digital tools and platforms.

The Distant Viewing Toolkit

I was fortunate to serve an advisory board member and chief participant in the USIA case study for the University of Richmond’s Distant Viewing Lab, which received a Tier II grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under the leadership of Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold, the Distant Viewing toolkit aims to develop computational techniques and algorithms that help scholars to analyze and parse motion picture collections at scale. By teaching the computer how to watch and what to meaningfully identify, we can complement traditional close readings of films with analysis that illustrates trends across the data set at large. In turn, we hope this not only fosters a deeper engagement with the films, but also facilitates searchability for others seeking to access the collection. Particularly with a massive, international motion picture archive such as the USIA’s (20,000 films), the Distant View toolkit may help us establish a useful base from which a multitude of scholars can put the films and their histories in conversations with each other.