FW: Robert Allen Kadir Has'ta
Zeynep Altundag
Bilgilerinize...
From: Melis Behlil [mailto:mel...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 11:16 AM
To: Zeynep Altundag
Subject: Robert Allen Kadir Has'ta
selam arkadaslar,
asagidaki gibi bir etkinligimiz var, bekleriz.
sevgiler,
m.
Dear All,
Renowned film scholar Robert Allen will be in town next week, and he’ll join us for an informal talk Thursday afternoon (12/9) at 4 PM in D-98; please join us. More information is below, and please be aware that Prof. Allen recommends you bring your own laptop along to explore the archives!
The last decade has seen the emergence of what has been called by Australian cinema scholar Richard Maltby and others “new cinema history.” It calls for an opening up of cinema as an object of study to include not just the surviving filmic texts from the past but also cinema’s role as an economic institution; site of social engagement, contestation, and exclusion; and global cultural phenomenon. The new cinema history has foregrounded “the importance of the institutional an geographic frameworks that direct and control the film viewing experience and the wider social-cultural situation of the audience, the film viewing experience and the wider social-cultural situation of the audience.” (Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran, Watching Films, p. 4). As a result, the notion of the cinema “archive” has expanded to include not just centralized repositories of film prints, but the literally uncountable of sources of historical evidence about cinema exhibition and moviegoing awaiting discovery in national and municipal government record offices, local libraries and museums, newspapers, and private collections.
Robert Allen, co-author of Film History: Theory and Practice and numerous other works on the historical study of cinema, argues that the new cinema history also requires an engagement with the methods and materials of the digital humanities, so that the hyper-abundance of cinema history data buried in millions of locations around the world can be preserved, curated, displayed, and shared. His online digital cinema history resource, “Going to the Show” (www.docsouth.unc.edu/gtts ) attempts to document every known cinema venue operating in the American state of North Carolina between 1896 and 1930. Using historical maps, photographs, city directories, postcards, architectural plans, business records, and historical newspapers, the project illuminates the social experience of cinema for the 2.2 million people living across more than 48,000 square miles of the American South during crucial period of modernization and racial oppression. “Going to the Show” was awarded the 2011 Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History by the American Historical Association.
In this workshop Allen will lead participants on an exploration of this digital archeological site, which contains information on more than 1300 cinema venues across 200 local communities using thousands of historical maps and tens of thousands of pieces of associated content. He will also discuss the work of his new lab, the University of North Carolina’s Digital Innovation Lab (http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu ), to extend the work of “Going to the Show” through the development of free, open-source software with which scholars, museums, and community organizations around the world can preserve, curate, and map the history of cinema exhibition and moviegoing in their localities.