Overview of The Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth College (Supervisors: Mark Williams and John Bell)

By Mark Williams, Dartmouth College

The Media Ecology Project (MEP) promotes the study of archival and historical moving image collections, enhances discovery of relevant corpora within these collections, and develops new, cross-disciplinary research tools and methods. MEP thus helps ensure the survival of endangered moving images via new published scholarship plus contributions of metadata and research on studied corpora back to the archival community: a virtuous cycle of access, research, and preservation. MEP is directed by Prof. Mark Williams, Department of Film and Media Studies and co-directed by John Bell, Director of the Data Experiences and Visualizations Studio at Dartmouth (DEV Studio).

As the name of the project suggests, MEP is fundamentally 1) a sustainability project that 2) develops literacies of moving image and visual culture history, and 3) functions as a collaborative incubator to foster new research questions and methods ranging from traditional Arts and Humanities close-textual analysis to computational distant reading.

To accomplish these goals, The Media Ecology Project has developed an infrastructure enabling networked scholarship and pedagogy incorporating moving image materials, including:

• The Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), which enables the creation of time-based annotations for specific geometric regions of the motion picture frame.
• org, which is a vocabulary-building tool that helps to grow and refine shared vocabularies for tags applied to time-based annotations.
• Automatic cut detection (with Shreyan Ganguly and Red Hen Lab via Google Summer of Code)

Together, these tools support both close textual analysis and computational analysis of moving pictures based on time-based annotations.[i] The MEP integration of Onomy.org and SAT with the digital publication platform Scalar has advanced scholarly and public engagement with moving image history. The new research questions we produce will enhance the value of the media archives we engage, and critically inform our pedagogy/curricular goals (e.g., media literacy) regarding the study of visual culture history and its legacies in the 21st century.

We are working to pursue international outreach for MEP.  A key premise of this outreach is that cultural exchange will always have great value in expanding our awareness and engagement with different cultures and historical perspectives about a world that we know to be complex and sometimes disquieting.  Indeed, the value of cultural exchange is a constant even when larger socio-political relations can be fraught and difficult.  Media studies is a leading field in the contemporary re-assessment and re-articulation of non-Western methodologies and ways of thinking as a necessary pursuit in 21^st century cultural studies and theories of representation.

MEP has been awarded multiple grants (NEH, Mellon, etc.), and has cultivated an impressive roster of diverse archival partners and collaborators.

Our major research collections include:

• Early US Cinema Compendium (materials from multiple major archives such as The Library of Congress); Plus related special journal issue (Journal of e-Media Studies 7:1, Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections)
• Early 68mm films produced internationally by use of the Biograph 68mm camera (Eye Film Institute, Amsterdam);
• High-definition digital “restorations” of early S. cinema via Film Preservation Society (ideal for machine reading);
• Early US cinema Lobby Card collection via private collector, The Library of Congress (over 13K cards);
• Civil Rights newsfilm and programming from archives across the United States (over 8000 items listed); Plus forthcoming related special journal issue of new scholarly essays;
• The Sherman Grinberg Library of historic newsreels (Paramount Newsreel and American Pathé newsreel);
• US Information Agency films and documents from the Cold War era (via National Archives), special journal issue (JOEMS 6:1);
• Films Division of India collection of post-independence documentary and experimental cinema;
• Emergent collection of films produced about and within the continent of Africa (multiple global archives);
• Chinese Cinema History via Shanghai University MOU (over 400 films), Venn Vision Grant with two Dartmouth colleagues;
• Collection of US narrative cinema history from 1890s to 1980 (over 800 films, with emphasis on minority cinemas)

Scholarly considerations of the mediated past are keenly recognized to be pressing and necessary. The study of moving images and visual culture in the 21^st century is at the confluence of technological, social, legal, archival, and artistic disciplines.  Study of these materials has been constrained by technology but also a set of assumptions delimited by industrial and commercial interests. MEP tools enable iterative workflows that can utilize expert manual annotations to refine and expand often problematic automated computational approaches to machine vision and machine learning.

MEP tools and workflows are also axiomatic to essential media literacy and pedagogical aims of 21^st century media studies, by developing new capacities for scholarship that push back against the blur of the emergent “attention culture” by opening new avenues of Humanities close-reading traditions in relation to computational “distant reading”.  This address to the dialectic articulated within the term “Digital Humanities” recognizes DH as an opportunity to identify, query, and re-define our individual and collective capacities to appreciate and develop the expressive capacities of moving image artforms.

MEP is poised to flourish as a distinctive example of Dartmouth responding to global problems with ingenuity and foresight: motivating a forward-thinking solution to a dire challenge regarding public memory and history, developing key collaborative relationships that are synergistically generative and inspire the participation of others, and strategizing a coherent infrastructure and system of governance that will guarantee the necessary and desired growth and sustainability of the project.

We will continue to develop technological advances (e.g., software and tools) that enable new research questions about historical media and foreground practical applications for the public good: to actively enhance public memory, human understanding, and artistic expression.