Month: April 2016

← News Archive

Conference: Doing Women’s Film and Television History III: Structures of Feeling, May 18-20, 2016

 

Doing Women’s Film and Television History III: Structures of Feeling 

May 18-20, 2016

Leicester, UK,

Keynote speakers: Miranda J Banks, Melanie Bell, Shelley Cobb, Kate Dossett, Jane Gaines, Michele Hilmes, Linda Ruth Williams

Building on the success of the previous two ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television History’ conferences, this three-day international conference will bring together academics, archivists, curators and creative practitioners to explore current developments in researching and interpreting the history of women’s activity in and around cinema and television. 

The central theme of this edition, ‘Structures of Feeling,’ is derived from the work of Raymond Williams on social change, and commemorates the 40th anniversary of the 1975 publication of Patterns of Discrimination Against Women in the Film and Television Industries by the Association of Cinematograph, Television and allied Technicians (ACTT) union’s Committee of Equality. Such reports are invaluable because they identify the ways in which women’s work in ‘below-the-line’ roles have been undervalued as well as highlighting the policies, practices and assumptions of the industries that keep gendered hierarchies in play.  Crucially they also make visible the largely ‘invisible labour’ of cinema and television that is carried out by women. 

While these ‘jumping-off’ points explore women working in UK production contexts, Doing Women’s Film & TV History III, like its predecessors, is international in scope and the conference will explore the ‘structures of feeling’ of women working in different national system of film and television production across diverse historical periods. The conference will also address the various critical and historiographic tools that can be utilised to bring women’s ‘structures of feeling’ in film and television history to view. 

Doing WFTHH III is organised by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, ‘A History of Women in the British Film and Television Industries,’ in association with the Women’s Film & Television History Network: UK/Ireland. 

For more information and the conference schedule, visit the conference website.

← News Archive

Conference: “Transformations I: Cinema & Media Studies Research Meets Digital Humanities Tools,” April 15-16, 2016, NYU

 

 

Transformations I: 

Cinema & Media Studies Research Meets Digital Humanities Tools

Friday, April 15 to Saturday, April 16, 2016

New York University Department of Cinema – Michelson Screening Room (721 Broadway, 6th Floor)

Organized by: Dept. of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, M.A. in Film and Media Studies, School of the Arts, Columbia University; Center for Humanities, NYU

 

The increasing momentum of Digital Humanities (DH) in many fields compels consideration of a new interrelation or conjuncture with Cinema and Media Studies (C&MS), or C&MS/DH.

Background: In 2009, the number of panels on Digital Humanities spiked at the Modern Language Conference, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies began featuring Digital Humanities workshops around 2013. But what is Digital Humanities? According to Columbia Assistant Professor of English Dennis Tenen, Digital Humanities began as “computational humanities,” but has morphed into a “project-based” research and scholarship model that borrows methods from the social sciences. Major research universities have invested in Digital Humanities initiatives on the assumption that computational methodologies are field-transforming for many academic disciplines. Cinema and Media Studies, however, is unlike the traditional humanities. Founded in the 1960s, Cinema Studies, as it was then called, was less interested in transforming existing fields of knowledge than in founding a separate discipline outside literary studies and art history. Beginning with the serious study of motion picture film production, closely connected to the making of audio visual works, the field has always had an eye on machine-made art as well as technological change. Not surprisingly, experiments in computational data-mining began in the field in the 1990s with initiatives at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television (now Cinematic Arts), pre-dating the formulation of what is now called Digital Humanities.

The challenge of scholars trained in Cinema and Media Studies today is to configure the “death of cinema?” as a historical question relative to emerging platforms and new industries of exhibition and production. In a perfect twist, scholars trained in critical theory themselves become media-making producers in order to both quantify and extrapolate. Or, beginning as film and video makers who became theorists, they return to their production roots. What then is the special relation of these researchers to what are now called Digital Humanities projects?

Transformations Participants include: Marsha Kinder (University of Southern California, Eric Hoyt (University Wisconsin-Madison), Mark Williams (Dartmouth University), Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia University), Steve F. Anderson (University of Southern California), Steve Mamber (UCLA), Deb Verhoeven (Deakin University), Vito Adriaensens (University of Antwerp/ Columbia), Antonia Lant (NYU), Jane Gaines (Columbia University), Marina Hassapopoulou (NYU), Kimon Keramidas (NYU).

For more information, including the conference schedule and participant bios, visit the conference website: http://transformationsconference.net/

 

 

 

⤒ Return to top