Film archives and digital humanities – an impossible match? New job descriptions and the challenges of the digital era

Authors

  • Adelheid Heftberger Austrian Film Museum (Vienna)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v30i57.16487

Keywords:

Dziga Vertov

Abstract

Th is article seeks to prompt a re-evaluation of the film archive's role within the current digital humanities debate as a logical, yet underrated, partner. The article invokes Jeffrey Schnapp’s and Todd Presner's plea from 2009 for digital humanities to create as its core aim a more democratic view of knowledge-producing institutions by including non-university research institutions as well as archives and museums. Archives, on the other hand, currently face the crucial challenge of how to digitise and present their collections online while struggling with rising related costs and having to redefi ne their mission as heritage keepers for often unique analogue material. The potential options for future collaboration between film archives and digital humanists as well as film scholars will also be discussed in this paper through an examination of the current situation.

Author Biography

Adelheid Heftberger, Austrian Film Museum (Vienna)

DR. ADELHEID HEFTBERGER is a researcher, archivist and curator at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. Her main areas of expertise include database development and metadata structures as well as the publication of archival films on DVD and the internet (e.g. Kinonedelja - Online Edition, etc.). In 2013, she obtained her PhD in Russian studies from the University of Innsbruck with a thesis entitled, "Visualisation of Filmic Structures in the Work of Dziga Vertov".

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Published

2014-12-19

How to Cite

Heftberger, A. (2014). Film archives and digital humanities – an impossible match? New job descriptions and the challenges of the digital era. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 30(57), 19 p. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v30i57.16487