The Media Ecology Project: Collaborative DH Synergies to Produce New Research in Visual Culture History
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: This essay details the development and current NEH-funded research goals of The Media Ecology Project (MEP), directed by Prof. Mark Williams and designed by Dr. John Bell at Dartmouth. The virtuous cycle of access, research, and preservation that MEP realizes is built upon a foundation of technological advance (software development) plus large-scale partnership networks with scholars, students, and institutions of historical memory such as moving image archives. The development of our Onomy vocabulary tool and NEH-funded Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT) are detailed, including their application in two advancement grants from the NEH regarding 1) early cinema history, and 2) television newsfilm that covered the civil rights movement in the U.S. 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 that fosters new research questions and methods ranging from traditional Arts and Humanities close-textual analysis to computational distant reading. New research questions in relation to these workflows will literally transform the value of media archives and support the development of interdisciplinary research and pedagogy/curricular goals (e.g., media literacy) regarding the study of visual culture history and its legacies in the 21st century.
Source: Digital humanities quarterly
Authors: Mark Williams, John Bell
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3174060195