Department of Cinema Studies

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Local Cinema History at Scale: Data and Methods for Comparative Exhibition Studies
(University of Oregon, 2022) Aronson, Michael; Peterson, Elizabeth; Hayden, Gabriele
Digital tools and digitized sources have expanded our ability to research and present regional film histories, along with the hope of conducting comparative work across both place and time. Alongside these projects are increasing calls for more deliberate coordination of tools, methods, and sources to create more meaningful comparisons. However, it remains difficult for researchers to know what digital projects exist for comparative work, and the methods, points of comparison, data structure, and sources used all considerably vary. Utilizing research data management principles, we conducted an exploratory survey of local film exhibition digital projects to document the current historiographic landscape, and to assess existing coverage of geography, time, sources, data structures, metadata schema, data accessibility and reproducibility. The dataset from the survey results can be shared by researchers to better discover each other’s work, but also to serve as a guide to best practices going forward.