Digital Film Historiography: Challenges of/and Interdisciplinarity

Digital methods were slow to make inroads into film studies and particularly into film historiography.There are a number of reasons for this situation of extended latency: as a multimodal object, film requires a complex methodology for analysis which, in its translation into computational and data-driven approaches, calls for an adequately multi-layered theoretical and methodological framework.As a legal entity, film is heavily protected by copyright which means that access is either not possible in lawful terms or requires lengthy negotiations.As a digital object, film comes in the form of large files that are not easy to handle and need considerable computing power.Finally, the sources relevant to the cinema's past were rather peripheral and the necessary infrastructures for them were non-existent for the longest time.Many of the sources have not been digitized and they are still not available online.This is especially true for data related to historically underrepresented agents in film history such as women and for data pertaining to film cultures beyond the Global North.All these factors contributed to a situation in which applying data-driven methods to cinema history as a method of investigation became a difficult challenge.Digital methods also require an investment of considerable resources: personal, technical, and institutional.Using digital methods in order to understand cultural phenomena, as it happens in other related disciplines, requires training, funding, personnel, a large amount of time for obtaining reliable results, and serious considerations in order to achieve long-term durability of both results and data.Undoubtedly, the agenda of many disciplines in the humanities were somewhat reluctant to these challenges.And there is still no consensus regarding how digital humanities as a field may fit with the particularities of specific communities in the humanities (cinema history, but also digital translation history, digital anthropology, or archaeology).Thus, we formulate a claim for a broader understanding which allows us to see our similarities, but also our differences and how different we Diana Roig-Sanz acknowledges the support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme that allowed to organize the conference "Rethinking Film History