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Cinema Context is an online database for researching the history of cinema exhibition and distribution in the Netherlands. It contains structured information on venues, persons and companies involved in the dissemination of film from the late nineteenth century until the present day, with an emphasis on the first half of the twentieth century. Aim of this paper is to document and critically reflect on the creation of the database and account for and motivate the choices made in constructing the data model and collecting the data.

This introduction to the special issue of performing arts data papers starts off by dwelling on the purpose of the (re-)use of structured data for performing arts history, and on the benefits of publishing data papers about these data sets. The authors present several observations on the general characteristics of data models in this scholarly domain and conclude by discussing each of the contributions to this special issue of the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the obvious implications for public health and the economy at a global scale, has also had significant social and cultural effects: the partial or complete lockdown of public life breaks social and cultural networks and habits, and necessitates the invention of new forms of communication, contact, and inspiration. Over the course of the pandemic, various initiatives have emerged that have tried to capture this unique moment in history by collecting documentation on the social and cultural impact of the pandemic on people’s daily lives. Most of these collections were created bottom-up, either by actively approaching individuals or communities to contribute or be interviewed, or by opening platforms where citizens could directly contribute documentation. In this paper, we analyse two such citizen-generated collections of experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic: the ‘Corona in the City’ collection, assembled by the Amsterdam Museum for an online exhibition with the same title, and the ‘Dagboek Corona’ (Corona Diary) collection of diary contributions, assembled by the Dutch public historian and journalist José Boon. The paper discusses the background of these citizen-generated COVID-19 collections, assessing their scope and accessibility, and presenting a first, qualitative analysis of their content. We conclude with a reflection on the implications of the findings for people’s social life and identity, indicating how the datasets can be explored in further research and how the findings may benefit effective policy making.

The digital transformation is turning archives, both old and new, into data. As a consequence, automation in the form of artificial intelligence techniques is increasingly applied both to scale traditional recordkeeping activities, and to experiment with novel ways to capture, organise, and access records. We survey recent developments at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and archival thinking and practice. Our overview of this growing body of literature is organised through the lenses of the Records Continuum model. We find four broad themes in the literature on archives and artificial intelligence: theoretical and professional considerations, the automation of recordkeeping processes, organising and accessing archives, and novel forms of digital archives. We conclude by underlining emerging trends and directions for future work, which include the application of recordkeeping principles to the very data and processes that power modern artificial intelligence and a more structural—yet critically aware—integration of artificial intelligence into archival systems and practice.

In this article, we demonstrate and argue that one way to acquire a better sense of cinemagoing in the silent film era is to investigate the relations between cinema locations, the socio-economic and demographic profile of their surroundings, and film programming. Driven by the centrality of space as one of the defining traits of new cinema history, we operationalise this inquiry through a data-driven toolkit of interconnected scalable approaches, in order to establish a multilayered contextualisation of Amsterdam’s early cinema landscape. We analyse Amsterdam’s historical cinema market both on the meso level of the city’s overall surroundings and on the micro level of two neighbouring film venues within a specific urban district. By switching between different levels of scale to analyse the cinemas’ programming profiles, we highlight the venues’ positioning within the socio-spatial structure of the city and their neighbourhood community in particular. In the future, the multifaceted analytical exploration enabled by our digital toolkit can be further enhanced by an increased availability of more fine-grained archival and contextual data.

Post-observation conversations are often used to discuss the quality of teaching and education; however, little is known about the use of this method for the evaluation of teaching in museums. Drawing on interviews, in the first research question, we explored how museum guides (n = 14) and educators (n = 8) perceived a post-observation conversation when they used the guide's self-evaluation as the starting point. This is in contrast to the educator (observation) directed conversations that currently prevail in the participating museums, all located in the Netherlands. For the second research question, we coded seven conversations in order to investigate the guides’ and educators’ actual participation. Results indicate that guides felt a sense of ownership; furthermore, the participants evaluated the conversations as more equally balanced. Analysis of the conversations confirmed that there was a balanced interaction and that the guides greatly influenced the conversation's content.

It has been widely acknowledged that reinstallations and re-executions of contemporary artworks substantially rely on available documentation. Especially for installations and performances it is crucial to record the artist’s intent, past iterations, and tacit knowledge involved in staging the artwork. The growing presence of contemporary artworks in museum collections increases the importance of documentation as a central focus of collection care. However, collections management systems have limitations in adequately presenting these often rich forms of documentation. Consequently, documentation required for presenting a specific complex artwork is often dispersed across multiple systems, drives, and dossiers inside various departments. In recent years, several initiatives responded to these challenges by implementing a digital platform supporting the conservation of contemporary art. Collaborative networked software such as wiki came into focus as a prominent choice for managing the related documentation. The wiki promises to integrate diverse material in one place and accommodate much-needed requirements such as multiple iterations of an artwork, relations between its elements, and multimedia content. This paper takes the case of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)’s experimental use of MediaWiki to determine whether and under what conditions a wiki is capable of supporting collection care sufficiently in terms of documenting time-based media art. The case further illustrates the consequence of adopting a content management system as knowledge base for conservation. While collections management systems are designed primarily to handle objects using forms, wikis are publishing platforms in the first place and provide a different kind of framework for artwork records. They are designed to employ text and media to compose articles. We propose to conceptualise this consequential role of conservator as a manager of content, an editor.

In this article we evaluate the relevance of 3D visualisation as a research tool for the history of cinemagoing. How does the process of building a 3D model of cinema theatres relate to what we already know about this history? In which ways does the modelling process allow for the synthesis of different types of archived cinema heritage assets? To what extent does this presentation of “content in context” helps us to better understand the history of film consumption? We will address these questions via a discussion of a specific case study, our visualisation of Jean Desmet’s Amsterdam Cinema Parisien theatre, one of the first permanent cinemas of the Dutch capital. First, we reflect on 3D as a research tool, outlining its technology and methodological principles and its usefulness for research into the historiography of moviegoing. Then we describe our 3D visualisation of Cinema Parisien, discussing the process of researching and building the model. Finally, we evaluate the result against the existing knowledge about the history of cinemagoing in Amsterdam and of this cinema theatre in particular, and answer the question to what extent 3D as a research tool can aid our understanding of the history of cinema consumption.

The article discusses the results of the research project “Data-Driven Film History: A Demonstrator of EYE's Jean Desmet Collection” (2014–15). With a team of media scholars, archivists, and software developers, we conducted data-driven research to explore the affordances and pitfalls of digital methods for mining the resources of film archives and researching (early) cinema history. Working with the collection of cinema owner and distributor Jean Desmet, preserved at the EYE Filmmuseum, we used digital tools for the specific purpose of visualizing distribution networks and color patterns in film programs in the Netherlands during silent cinema's transitional years. The article discusses the lessons we learned from the project, both as scholars and as archivists. It opens with a brief introduction to the Desmet Collection and then considers our motivations, on one hand, for exploring digital research methods and, on the other, for choosing a particular set of tools. Subsequently, it discusses the mapping tool we developed as part of the project, reflecting in particular on the metadata issues it raised. In the final part of the article, we recount our experience of experimenting with tools for color analysis, paying particular attention to how the color patterns they generate might ultimately be combined with a data mapping and what sort of research possibilities this might in turn open up. The article demonstrates, among other things, how crucial it is for researchers to understand the provenance, affordances, and limitations of the data at their disposal and to make the discrepancies between them visible and transparent for others–including archivists.

The increasing availability of films and cinema-related heritage in digital form, as well as the creation and use of structured datasets related to the contexts of film production, distribution and consumption, have invited the use of new, computational approaches for studying cinema and its history. In this article, we review the online database Cinema Context (www.cinemacontext.nl) and its impact on the study of historical film cultures. Cinema Context is a relational database and research instrument for studying the history of film culture in the Netherlands. After an introduction to Cinema Context and its position within the international research context, we address its usage in order to discuss the opportunities and challenges of transforming a complex phenomenon such as Dutch film culture into structured data, and we reflect on its implications for film historical research.

Summary The growing availability of historical media-related data and sources in digital form, and the development of tools for searching, analyzing, and visualizing them, provide promising new avenues for media studies research. But the uptake of these data and tools in mainstream media studies is still rather modest. The author argues that exploiting the advantages of computational research is necessary because scholars are already using digital data and tools, and because they will be disadvantaged if they do not critically engage with them. Computational media research requires increased methodological awareness and an improved transparency and responsiveness of data and tools.

Automatic estimation of the quality of Web documents is a challenging task, especially because the definition of quality heavily depends on the individuals who define it, on the context where it applies, and on the nature of the tasks at hand. Our long-term goal is to allow automatic assessment of Web document quality tailored to specific user requirements and context. This process relies on the possibility to identify document characteristics that indicate their quality. In this paper, we investigate these characteristics as follows: (1) we define features of Web documents that may be indicators of quality; (2) we design a procedure for automatically extracting those features; (3) develop a Web application to present these results to niche users to check the relevance of these features as quality indicators and collect quality assessments; (4) we analyse user’s qualitative assessment of Web documents to refine our definition of the features that determine quality, and establish their relevant weight in the overall quality, i.e., in the summarizing score users attribute to a document, determining whether it meets their standards or not. Hence, our contribution is threefold: a Web application for nichesourcing quality assessments; a curated dataset ofWeb document assessments; and a thorough analysis of the quality assessments collected by means of two case studies involving experts (journalists and media scholars). The dataset obtained is limited in size but highly valuable because of the quality of the experts that provided it. Our analyses show that: (1) it is possible to automate the process of Web document quality estimation to a level of high accuracy; (2) document features shown in isolation are poorly informative to users; and (3) related to the tasks we propose (i.e., choosing Web documents to use as a source for writing an article on the vaccination debate), the most important quality dimensions are accuracy, trustworthiness, and precision.

The proliferation of digital technologies has changed the way we perceive of and use audiovisual archives and their holdings. The emergence of virtual archives and online portals is changing the relation between the keepers and users of audiovisual heritage, challenging the role of the archivist as principal expert on the knowledge the collection represents. In this article I investigate the implications of these developments for the status of the (audiovisual) archive as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Author discusses a recent experiment with social tag-ging, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s video labeling game WAISDA?, and asks to what extent experiments like this destabilize the existing archival platforms for validating and describing audiovisual heritage. She argues that, even though these new forms of access introduce a new type of ‘participatory knowledge’, in fact digitization only exposes the archives’ inherently dynamic, performative nature.

This article describes a study of the affordances of a group of information systems (so-called “tools”) that make it possible to do computer-mediated film analyses. Film scholars have started using these tools to annotate and analyze digital film in various ways, yet not much is presently known about the implications of using these computational tools for film scholarship. The authors argue that it is important that scholars discover and use these tools to understand and critically discuss how the systems influence the process of analysis and its results. These systems, which are created and used by different groups of media-related professionals and scholars from different disciplines, include, among others: professional video annotation tools, and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (QDA). This study presents: (1) an inventory of the different types of existing tools, (2) a use case, where the authors tested these tools in a small film analysis project (specifically, the authors evaluated the tools ELAN and NVivo for the analysis of an excerpt of the silent semidocumentary film People on Sunday), and (3) a preliminary evaluation of the implications of using these tools for film analysis, to better understand and critically discuss their methodological impact in film and media studies. The authors found that, at this stage, the most significant methodological impact is the option of making the analytic procedures more explicit. Consequently, the tools ask users to conceptualize more precisely the methods they employ. While this capability might be disparaged as the “scientification” of a scholarly practice, we argue that the new digital tools encourage more self-reflection about scholarly work and multiply the levels of communication possible with peers, both informally and through scholarly publication.

editorial Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 2012 vol. 15 no. 2

This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rapidly developing technologies that cross over into other domains such as broadcasting and social media, have challenged the traditional infrastructures for the collection, preservation and exhibition of art. Addressing these challenges, the authors provide a historical and theoretical survey of the field, and introduce students to the challenges and difficulties of preserving and exhibiting media art through a series of first-hand case studies. Situated at the threshold between archival practices and film and media theory, it also makes a strong contribution to the growing literature on archive theory and archival practices.

This article investigates the implications of online access to television archival material and the knowledge it represents. I discuss the impact of digitisation on the TV archive, and ask how that affects the role of the archivist as a gatekeeper to its knowledge. I argue that far from being a gatekeeper, the archivist becomes an editor of data generated by various agents. The article also questions the impact of this development on the status of television archives as repositories of television history - what happens to the 'history' in television history when its digitised source material becomes part of an eternal online present?

Review of: Karen L. Ishizuka & Patricia R. Zimmermann (red.). Mining the home movie: excavations in histories and memories. Berkeley ca (University of California Press) 2008, 333 pp., (ca.) isbn 978 0 520 24807 6

Review of: Martina Roepke. Privat-Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945. Hildesheim etc. (Olms) 2006, 236 p., isbn 3 487 13190 0

Book review of: Christian Delage. La Vérité par l’image: De Nuremberg au procès Milosevic. Parijs (Denoël) 2006, 384 pp., isbn 2 207 25798 3

Recensie van: Francis X. Blouin Jr. en William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives. New York (Oxford University Press) 2011, 257 p. isbn 978 0 19 974054 3