Media Ecology Project

PRELIDA Consolidation and Dissemination WorkshopRiva del Garda 17 October 2014

Mark WilliamsDepartment of Film and Media StudiesDartmouth College

Saturday, October 18, 14

MEP GoalsRealize a sustainability project in relation to cultural memory and media history

Use linked data to support distributed analysis of and public engagement with the rich and often neglected legacy of audio-visual media

• Develop networked scholarship in relation to online archival content

• Promote and augment the dynamic ecology of media

• Support the essential work of the archives in relation to the public sphere and public memory

• Engage primary research across disciplines

• Energize dynamic new forms of scholarship and publication


MEP as a DH Project

• Cultural-critical awareness and institutional awareness

• Collegiality and connectedness (openness, collaboration, support)

• Translation work (across disciplines, expertise, vocabularies)

• Experimentation (regarding methods, work-flow, output)

• Negotiating comfort zones (respecting difference, managing dissonance)

• Text vs. Image

• Research Methods vs. Audiences

• Close vs. Distant Reading

Underscoring values of Digital Humanities


DH Challenge

“Currently, I fear, the digital humanities are not ready to take up their full responsibility because the field does not yet possess an adequate critical awareness of the larger social, economic, and cultural issues at stake. The side of the digital humanities that descends from humanities computing lacks almost all cultural-critical awareness, and the side that descends from new media studies is indiscriminately critical of society and global informational ‘empire’ without sufficient focus on the specifically institutional — in this case, higher education — issues at stake.” — Alan Liu, “State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and Critique, “ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (2012) 11: 11.


MEP StatusBeta development; iterative processes to achieve overall and specific goals; working in several areas at once:

• building a research environment by adapting existing platforms and connecting them

• engaging a learning/teaching model

• recruiting partners to imagine new research “spaces,” practices, and projects

• supporting development of machine-reading and crowd-sourcing tools


MEP Pilot Projects

• Paper Print Collection (LOC) -- DOMITOR participation

• Newsreel, Newsfilm, Broadcast News -- multi-archival participation

• “In the Life” (UCLA Film and Television Archive) -- building scholar participation


The Tramp and the Muscular Cook (1898)


Paper Print Pilot

Mediathread at Dartmouth



“The Necklace (1909)”


Florence Lawrence, “The Biograph Girl”Saturday, October 18, 14

Scalar (University of Southern California)Saturday, October 18, 14

Paper Print Project Partners


Media Ecology Project

Technology

Transcript of Media Ecology Project