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The Measurement of Aesthetic Phenomena

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Digital Humanities and Film Studies

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Abstract

To say that a work of art may be broken down into smaller units may be a banal statement. It is also nothing new to portray or arrange these building blocks in one or another way, whether as part of the artistic process or due to a technical necessity during production. What for creative artists is an integral component of their work raises methodological questions in scholarship: is it academically even constructive to divide works of art into measurable units, to extract formalised data and transfer them to another system of recording in order to test theses or attain new statements? And if so, for which corpora and approaches would it be conceivable and meaningful? Different theoretical approaches have, after all, led to various methods in the study of film and literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Adam Ganz and Fionn Murtagh have delivered a lecture in Swansea in 2010 entitled “From Data Mining in Digital Humanities to New Methods of Analysis of Narrative and Semantics.” See also the work by Manuel Burghardt (https://ch.uni-leipzig.de/burghardt/).

  2. 2.

    See Barbara Flückiger’s ERC Advanced Grant “FilmColors” (http://www.research-projects.uzh.ch/p21207.htm) and the work done by Niels-Oliver Walkowski and Johannes Pause (urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus4-25910).

  3. 3.

    For example, at the Centre for Information Modelling at Graz University, cf. https://informationsmodellierung.uni-graz.at/de/zentrum/. Last accessed 25 Aug 2015.

  4. 4.

    A further central report assigns the “cyberinfrastructure” a role within the humanities and social sciences, cf. American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences: Our Cultural Commonwealth. The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 2006. URL: http://www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/Programs/Our_Cultural_Commonwealth.pdf. Last accessed 27 Aug 2014.

  5. 5.

    Cf. http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/. Last accessed 8 Aug 2018.

  6. 6.

    Lisa Spiro, director of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE), has put together a very useful document in this context: it lists useful addresses and institutions on topics from workshops, tutorials and best practice documents to the planning of one’s own projects (cf. Lisa Spiro: Getting Started in Digital Humanities. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 14.10.2011. URL: https://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/getting-started-in-the-digital-humanities/. Last accessed 8 Aug 2018.

  7. 7.

    For example, the project BFI Filmography at https://filmography.bfi.org.uk/, where filmographic data can be visualised. Last accessed 8 Aug 2018

  8. 8.

    See https://www.lost-films.eu/. Last accessed 8 Aug 2018.

  9. 9.

    See https://www.filmmuseum.at/en/collections/special_collections/schlemmer_frame_collection. Last accessed 8 Aug 2018.

  10. 10.

    One could, at any rate, mention the information and library science courses at the FH Potsdam and the HU Berlin, which, however, do not specialise in film, as well as those at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, the HTW Berlin and Amsterdam University, which all have different areas of specialisation.

  11. 11.

    For a definition cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data. Last accessed 8 Aug 2018, Manovich also refers to Wikipedia.

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  1. German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv), Berlin, Germany

    Adelheid Heftberger

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  1. Adelheid Heftberger
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Heftberger, A. (2018). The Measurement of Aesthetic Phenomena. In: Digital Humanities and Film Studies. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02864-0_2

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