David Pierce is a historian and archivist. A former curator at the BFI, Pierce is the founder and co-director of the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), a collection of digitised film trade journals, comprising more than 1.3 million scanned pages. He is also co-author, with James Layton, of The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935 (George Eastman House, 2015).

David Pierce’s talk examines the origins and developments of the MHDL and highlights the challenges and possibilities when working with online archival materials.

[This post contains video, click to play]

Useful Sources

MHDL’s Partner Libraries:

• Library of Congress (LoC) – Packard Campus: http://www.loc.gov/avconservation/packard/
• University of Maryland – Library of American Broadcasting: http://www.lib.umd.edu/special
• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Library: http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/library/index
• Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum: http://nilesfilmmuseum.org
• Pacific Film Archive Library: http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfalibrary/

Maria Velez-Serna is a Research Assistant in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She obtained her PhD there with a thesis titled Film Distribution in Scotland Before 1918, which proposes an empirical approach to the history of the local film trade, using archive and local press material. Her research interests include early cinema and film exhibition, with a particular interest in the digital humanities and historical geo-databases.

In her talk Dr Velez-Serna addresses the field- and library work undertaken for her study into the history of early cinema in Scotland. In particular, she stresses the methodological consequences of digitisation for researchers.

[This post contains video, click to play]

Useful Sources

• Early Cinema in Scotland: http://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/
• Scottish Archive Network: http://www.scan.org.uk/
• Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI): http://huni.net.au/
• Archives Hub: http://archiveshub.ac.uk
• PostgreSQL (Open source database management system): http://www.postgresql.org/
• Example of combined use of PostgreSQL and QGIS (Open source geographic information system): http://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/maria/scotlandcinemaps.html
• A Vision of Britain Through Time: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/
• The British Newspaper Archive: http://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
• Scottish Post Office Directories: http://digital.nls.uk/directories/index.html
• Digimap: http://digimap.edina.ac.uk/
• National Library of Scotland: http://www.nls.uk/
• The Scotsman Digital Archive: http://archive.scotsman.com/

References

• Abel, Richard. “The Pleasures and Perils of Big Data in Digitized Newspapers.” Film History: An International Journal 25, no. 1 (2013): 1–10.
• Allen, Robert C. “Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal.” Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing, edited by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, 20–33. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008.
• Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Hoyt, Eric. “Lenses for Lantern: Data Mining, Visualization, and Excavating Film History’s Neglected Sources.” Film History: An International Journal 26, no. 2 (2014): 146–68.
• Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013.
• Mussell, Jim. “Doing and Making: History as Digital Practice.” History in the Digital Age, edited by Tony Weller, 79–93. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
• Serna, Laura Isabel. Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
• Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Karl Magee works as Curator of the Archives and Special Collections of the University of Stirling. The archive comprises a number of collections, including the John Grierson collection which includes notebooks, lectures, correspondence, articles, scripts and production notes that were donated to the University in the 1970s by the filmmaker’s wife, Margaret Grierson.

Karl Magee’s talk addresses the relationship between the archive and researcher and the curatorial strategies informing the selection of digitized material. The talk focuses on the collections of the Grierson Archive at the University of Stirling.

[This post contains video, click to play]

Useful Sources

• The National Archives: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
• The National Archives – Digital Zeitgeist 2012: http://labs.nationalarchives.gov.uk/zeitgeist/
• University of Stirling Archives on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40937572@N08/
• Wellcome Library: http://wellcomelibrary.org/
• University of Stirling Archives: http://archives.wordpress.stir.ac.uk/
• Archives Hub: http://archiveshub.ac.uk
• Archives Portal Europe: https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/

James Layton is a historian and archivist specializing in motion picture technology, in particular the development of colour and widescreen in the 1920s and 1930s. Layton is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, and is presently working as Manager of the Film Preservation Centre of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

In his talk, James Layton considers the methodological approaches he adopted throughout his research project on the early history of Technicolor. In particular, he provides practical advice on how to plan, conduct and organise your archival research.

[This post contains video, click to play]

Useful Sources

• George Eastman House: http://www.eastmanhouse.org/
• Margaret Herrick Library: http://www.oscars.org/library
• Google Drive: https://www.google.com/drive/

References

• Layton, James and David Pierce. The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915-1935. Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 2015.