I am currently busy working on the project ‘Data-Driven Film History: a Demonstrator of EYE’s Jean Desmet Collection’ which is a small pilot project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) running from September 2014 till May next year. The aim of the project is to develop a demonstrator tool which proposes new ways for scholars to research and visualize the Jean Desmet Collection held at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, a collection which has been almost completely digitized.

The Jean Desmet collection is an immensely important collection, recognized as UNESCO World Heritage in 2011, which contains approximately 950 films from cinema’s early years from between 1907-1916, 2000 posters, 700 posters as well as some 120.000 business documents. It is a collection which especially in the 1980s and 1990s through screenings at the silent film festival Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone in  Italy made film scholars aware of the great variety and richness of for example film colours in the silent era, and has been crucial in understanding the cinema distribution networks in the Netherlands as well as in Northern Europe. The Dutch film historian Ivo Blom who is one of the most knowledgeable scholars on the collection has written in more detail on this in blog posts and in book form (which can be downloaded for free!) here and here.

It is exactly the aspects of film distribution and colour that we wish our tool to address and which we are currently figuring out how could be done best. I will write about this later in more depth, when we have gone beyond the phase of deciding on the research design and determining exactly how the programming will be done. Yet, for those who cannot wait and are eager to know more about our project, I will be co-presenting a paper on the research questions and methods we have lined up so far, tomorrow at the world conference of the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT) at the Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam with my colleague Jasmijn van Gorp from Utrecht University. The paper is co-written with Eef Masson (University of Amsterdam), Giovanna Fossati (EYE Film Institute Netherlands/University of Amsterdam) and Julia Noordegraaf (University of Amsterdam) and a livestream can be followed here, so there is no excuse for not tuning in at 3.30 pm CET!