May 8-10, 2019
The three-day Digital Tools for Moving Image Analysis Symposium brought together scholars, librarians, archivists, and technologists to discuss current computational methods of research on video and film and brainstorm about future interdisciplinary research. Participants discussed current research tools and methods for time-based markup of moving images, formal analysis of film properties, machine learning software for object classification and facial tagging, and linguistic analysis of media paratext. This symposium was an extension of two NEH-funded projects underway at MEP: The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage project and the Paper Print and Biograph Compendium.
The symposium included presentations by:
- John Bell and Mark Williams (Dartmouth)
- Jenny Oyallon-Koloski (University of Illinois)
- Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold (University of Richmond)
- Liliana Melgar (University of Amsterdam)
- Barbara Flueckiger (University of Zurich)
- Peter Uhrig (University of Osnabrück)
- Christian Gosvig Olesen (University of Amsterdam)
- Gines Hidalgo (Carnegie Mellon University)
One of the keynote speakers for the Digital Tools Symposium was our dear friend and colleague Paul Spehr, who passed away in December, 2019. Here is a recording of his keynote presentation, which surveys his important scholarship about the 68mm Biograph camera that was utilized in the earliest years of cinema, around the world. The films screened in his presentation were courtesy of the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam, and we are grateful for their permission to include them in this record of the event.
For more information, see our news post about the 2019 Symposium.