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From its first meeting in 2004 HoMER members have discussed ways to collaborate in their research and over the years many collaborative and comparative projects have been launched. The Homer@Rome 2022 conference would like to celebrate these initiatives by organizing three workshops all related to how joint projects can be facilitated.
Workshop 1 – Monday 4th July, 15.00 – 18.00
Turning Local Cinema Transnational: Making Your Project Part of the Comparative Data Conversation.
Pre-conference workshop with Michael Aronson, Elizabeth Peterson and Gabriele Hayden (University of Oregon)
Workshop 2 – Wednesday 6th July, 14.00 – 16.00
Linking Cinema Data. An interactive workshop on bridging multiple cinema datasets through Linked Open Data.
Julia Noordegraaf, Leon van Wissen, Ivan Kisjes (University of Amsterdam), Thunnis van Oort (Radboud University) and Clara Pafort-Overduin (Utrecht University)
Workshop 3 – Friday 8th July, 14.00 – 16.40
Cinema Histories Platform. Connecting stories of cinema-going.
Daniela Treveri Gennari (Oxford Brookes University), Lies Van de Vijver (Ghent University), Pierluigi Ercole (De Montfort University), Mike Pidd and Matt Groves (University of Sheffield), Philippe Meers (University of Antwerp), Daniel Biltereyst (Ghent University), Åsa Jernudd and Jono Van Belle (University of Orebro)
For a full description of the workshops see below.
We would like you to let us know in advance if you wish to participate. It is still early days but you can always change your mind and cancel. You can register through this link.
Data doesn’t have to be scary or hard. As our subfield continues to mature, and as the range of historical exhibition projects grows and evolves, comparative and collaborative work is increasingly a priority of our shared agendas. But as our recent survey of online historical exhibition projects shows, it remains surprisingly difficult for researchers to know what projects exist for comparative work, and the range of methods, data structure and sources used. And while many of us have developed richly complex microhistories with the goal of sharing and comparing our resulting data, the goal, for various reasons, has continued to be out of reach. This opening workshop will introduce participants to simple, user-friendly practices for archiving and sharing data based on the FAIR data principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse of digital assets. This hands-on event will teach you how to structure and share data sets for re-use from your planned or existing historical exhibition projects. Ahead of the conference in July, HOMER will distribute a short survey to identify specific needs of interested attendees.
Workshop Learning Outcomes:
Participants will be able to discuss the reasons why data sharing is important to our field
Participants will recognize and know how to utilize FAIR data principles
Participants will be able to identify common challenges with tabular data sets
Participants will practice documenting data sets
By the end of the workshop, participants will have either archived some of their own real data, or practiced the steps involved in archiving sample/practice data.
Who Should Attend:
People at the early stages of building a project
People looking for guidance about how to create structured data to ensure consistency, interoperability, and share-ability
People looking to make their existing data accessible and discoverable
People with a finished digital project who would like to share the existing data behind it
In this interactive workshop we will bring together cinema datasets as Linked Open Data (LOD) and explore the research potential of this approach.
The workshop consists of two parts. In the first, online, pre-conference part on Wednesday 8 June 3-5 pm CET, we will focus on the data preparation process and the data model. Participants can provide a description and small sample of their own datasets – in their current, non-LOD format – upon registration for the pre-conference workshop.
In the second part, which will take place at the HoMER conference on Wednesday 6th July 2022, 14.00-16.00, we will focus on working with the linked data and writing data stories that showcase the types of research questions that we can pose to combined data sets. Examples of questions we expect to investigate include: Which of the films screened during WWII are still shown in European cities in the early 1950s? Which German film stars kept on showing up on other Europeans screens? We can discuss other/more questions while preparing the workshop.
In the pre-conference part on 8 June, we will start with an introduction on the principles of Linked Open Data, outline the data model used for our conversion of Cinema Context to LOD, and discuss the data preparation process. We will ask participants to prepare their datasets in a similar way and send in their data by 22 June 2022. We will provide an elaborate how-to-do manual.
We will give feedback on the datasets and if necessary will ask participants to implement the feedback.
During the workshop at the HoMER conference, we are then ready to query the linked datasets and test them by formulating research questions that would exceed the scope of a single dataset. We will also show how the Linked Open Data format opens up possibilities to link to other, external datasets, such as Wikidata (e.g., for contextual information on cinemas and movies). During and/or after the workshop, we ask participants to write a brief data story about the datasets, the process of linking them and the research it allows us for, which will be published online as a lasting deliverable of the workshop.
To enable smooth sessions and (hopefully) prevent losing time on technical issues with participant’s own data, we will provide several prepared datasets for all workshop participants to work with beforehand and during the workshop.
Several digital projects have been developed over the last few years with the intention of providing researchers with searchable platforms for cinema data and consequently encouraging collaborations across projects that investigate diverse geographical and temporal dimensions.
The European Cinema Audiences (ECA) digital archive is an example of such a platform, which – based on and inspired from the Cinema Context dataset and data model – aims to integrate programming, exhibition and oral history data of seven countries across Europe.
The Cinema Belgica (CB) platform, which is also inspired by the Dutch Cinema Context’s data model, offers researchers detailed data on film exhibition places, programming, censorship and other types of information (e.g. box-office data on a selection of venues) in Belgium.
However, in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, the new Cinema Histories (www.cinemahistories.org) archive aims to act as a model for other New Cinema History current or future projects, who intend to compare any of their data with other datasets. The Cinema Histories archive is an online space where comparative analysis, visualization and investigation across different datasets is made possible.
In this workshop, in the first part we will present the model developed through both the European Cinema Audiences, and Cinema Belgica. We will explain how the data collection and upload has taken place, and we will present examples of analysis and visualizations across the data integrated in the new Cinema Histories archive.
In the second part, we will conduct an exercise where participants will be able to investigate specific research questions and explore the potential of comparative analysis and visualizations. We will make use of three datasets (ECA, Cinema Belgica and Swedish Cinema) in order to investigate programming patterns in different European cities across different periods of time.
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