Visualising Film Archives: Digital Tools and Practice-Based Media Histories
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Thanks to digitisation, film archives are becoming vital resources for digital scholarship and artistic research. Moreover, advancements in digital research methods – including (collaborative) video annotation, videographic criticism, and AI – are redefining how we approach archival films’ material and stylistic histories, circulations, and representations. As this development reshapes established research traditions, it also opens up new avenues for critically interrogating archives. At the same time, it raises questions as to how digitisation processes and digital preservation techniques might reframe media historical inquiry. How may we rethink archival access for scholars and artistic researchers? How can practice-based research challenge the conventions and biases of AI tools used for archival access? And how can digital archiving support collective and collaborative forms of media history?
Addressing these questions through both historical and contemporary perspectives, Amanda Egbe (University of the West of England) and Christian Gosvig Olesen (University of Amsterdam) will respectively discuss their recent practice-based projects Where Were You in 1992? and Where Do You Keep Your Black People?, and a newly published monograph Visualizing Film History: Film Archives and Digital Scholarship (Indiana University Press, 2025). The debate will feature demos and documentation of selected digital projects and showcase current strategies for working with film archives in digital scholarship and artistic research.
Where Were You in 1992?: https://1992.maydayrooms.org/
Visualizing Film History: https://iupress.org/9780253071835/visualizing-film-history/
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington