Steve Anderson's presentation at the NYU-Columbia Transformations conference (April 2016)

1. The Case for the Cinematic Humanities
http://technocinema.usc.edu
@ironmanx28
Steve Anderson
sfanders@usc.edu

2. • Applied Mathematics
• Videographic scholarship
• Vectors
• Scalar
• Critical Commons
• Difference analyzer
• USC iMAP PhD program

3. UCLA IPAM | Culture Analytics | 2016

4. Manovich, et al | Cultural Analytics | Selfiecity (2014)
Phototrails: Instagram Cities (2015)

5. Google | Google Brain | 2012!
“Unsupervised Learning”!
“Deep Learning”!
!
Google | Deep Dream | 2015!

6. Videographic Roundtable
role for video essays in DH?

7. Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley, Drew Morton (2014)

8. Mark Rappaport, Rock Hudson’s Home
Movies (1992)
Mark Rappaport, From the Journals
of Jean Seberg (1995)
origins of the video essay

9. Thom Andersen
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Thom Andersen + Noel Burch
Red Hollywood (1996)
entangled relations of
historiography and copyright

10. Center for Media and Social Impact
Best Practices in Fair Use (2005)
Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi
Reclaiming Fair Use (2013)

11. Catherine Grant, Film Studies for Free (2008)
Indiewire, PressPlay (2011)
Fandor | Keyframe (2012)
video essays are now a mature,
legible, viable form

12. Kogonada (auteur)
reverse engineering perception to recognize previously unnoticed patterns
Passageways in Ozu (2013)
POV in Breaking Bad (2012) Single-point perspective in Kubrick
(2012)

13. Kogonada
What is Neorealism (2013)
multiple split-screens, annotations + elastic time signatures

14. I want to propose a theory and practice of a
Deformed Humanities. A humanities born of
broken, twisted things. And what is broken
and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer
of knowledge.
- Mark Sample

15. Aitor Gametxo, Variation: The Sunbeam (2011)
Jeff Desom, Rear Window Loop (2010)
revealing relations of time
and space

16. Movie Bar Code | Vanishing Point (1971)
computational engines for
formal distillation
Kevin L. Ferguson | Film Visualization
Mad Max Fury Road (2015)

17. Jason Mittell | Videographic Deformations | 2016
computational engines for time-base deformation
Singin’ in the Rain in ascending order
of shot length
Hard Day’s Night with every shot equalized
to average shot length

18. If videographic essayists want a seat at the table of
Digital Humanities, then they (we) need to start
acting as much like digital humanists as video editors.
This means sharing data sets (media), open-sourcing
tools and thinking in terms of systems, extensibility
and interoperability.

19. Holly Willis | “Writing Images and the Cinematic Humanities” | Dec. 2015

20. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/critical-interfaces

21. If humanists are interested in creating in their
work with digital technologies - the subjective,
inflected, and annotated processes central to
humanistic inquiry - they must be committed
to designing the digital systems and tools for
their future work.
Johanna Drucker
Chronicle of Higher Education (2009)

22. Tara McPherson + Steve Anderson | 2005
http://vectorsjournal.org
Vectors Journal
infrastructure for producing and validating digital scholarship

23. Erik Loyer | Opertoon

24. Marsha Kinder | Labyrinth Research Initiative on Interactive Narrative

25. The Voyager Company
(1984-97)
“a film school in a box”
The Criterion Collection
Institute for the Future of the Book
Sophie (2000 - 2010)
Night Kitchen | TK3
1997-2000
Bob Stein

26. Erik Loyer | Lair of the Marrow
Monkey (1998)
Kairos (1996)
New London Group (1994)
(net art)
Electronic Literature
Organization (1999)

27. Charles and Ray Eames
Glimpses of America | 1959
Mathematica | 1961
competing origin myths for DH

28. Roberto Busa | IBM 705 | 1958
competing origin myths for DH

29. Computationally augmented research: Arclight / Kinomatics / etc.
Mediated / Multi-mediated / Multimodal expression: video essays / Criterion
etc.
Labyrinth / Vectors
Media + Computationally augmented authoring: Scalar / MediaThread
ClipsNotes / Difference
Analyzer
Foundational access to unlicensed media: Critical Commons

30. Rebecca Emigh
Mary Agnes Krell
Jane McGonigal
Julian Bleecker
Lisa Lynch
Elena Razlogova
Melanie Swalwell
Amelie Hastie
Rick Prelinger
Caren Kaplan
Perry Hoberman
Donald Hoffman
Anne Friedberg
Eric Faden
Trevor Paglen
Jennifer Terry
Minoo Moallem
Jon Ippolito
Craig Dietrich
Greg Smith
Peter Lunenfeld
McKenzie Wark
Vectors Journal
Ehren Fordyce
Gwen Allen
Katherine Hayles
Alice Gambrell
Todd Presner
David Lloyd
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
Kim Christen
Chris Cooney
Judith Jackson Fossett
Caren Kaplan
Laura Marks
Sharon Daniel
David Theo Goldberg
Stefka Hristova
Mark Kann
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Christian Sandvig
Mark Hansen
Elizabeth Povinelli
Richard Marciano
Emily Thompson

31. Vector Space
experiments with design, affect, interface, publishing models
Vectors Editorial Statement

32. experiments with medium specificity
Anne Friedberg | Virtual Window Interactive
Melanie Swalwell | Castoffs from the
Golden Age

33. adaptations of cinematic form
David Theo Goldberg | Blue Velvet

34. Steve Anderson + Erik Loyer | Technologies of History Interactive (2011)
denial of visual pleasure and
narrative history

35. Vectors dynamic indexing
transition from design orientation to information architecture

36. lowering technological barriers
to electronic authoring
lowering legal barriers to
electronic authoring

37. University press partners
MIT Press
Duke University Press
University of California Press
University of Michigan Press
NYU Press
Open Humanities Press
Archive partners
Getty Research Institute
Shoah Foundation
Hemispheric Institute
Huntington Library
Internet Archive
Critical Commons
Alliance for Networking Visual Culture
Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, Phil Ethington, Erik Loyer, Craig Dietrich

38. • “scalable”
• free + open source
• long-form scholarly argument
• media rich + archive-driven
• annotation + modularity
• close + ‘distant’ reading
Scalar
http://scalar.usc.edu

39. RDF-based flat ontologies

40. close + distant reading
• visualization tools for part-whole context
• time-based annotations for close textual analysis

41. American Literature Vol. 85, No.4 (2013)
http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/chaosandcontrol

42. American Literature Vol. 85, No.4 (2013)
http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/chaosandcontrol

43. Screening Surveillance (2015)
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2015/03/11/screening-surveillance

44. Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (MIT 2017)
http://technocinema.net

45. critical archive video essay print book
It’s all about affordances!

46. Researching in Public
or
What does it mean to “open source” a media-based data set?

47. MacArthur Digital Media & Learning | Critical Commons | 2008
http://criticalcommons.org

48. http://criticalcommons.org
fair use advocacy + public media archive

49. media companions
Television: Critical Methods and Applications
Jeremy Butler
Complex TV
Jason Mittell

50. fugitive archives
Economics of Seinfeld | Linda Ghent Fan vids | OTW
In 8 years online, not one DMCA takedown!

51. Scalar Media Companions Electronic journals

52. In Media Res
[in]Transition
backend publishing architecture

53. Technocinema annotated archive: 500+ clips
open (media) data

54. Difference Analyzer | 2016
Steve Anderson + Chandler McWilliams
http://differenceanalyzer.net

55. open source VJ mixer for comparative media analysis
http://differenceanalyzer.net

56. Media Arts + Practice (iMAP) PhD
• practice-based PhD
• launched in 2007
• three students per year
• humanities research + design + computation

57. Media Arts + Practice (iMAP) PhD
curriculum visualization by student

58. iMAP PhD dissertations
Amanda Tasse
(poetic science merging game design,
cinema and neurobiology)
Veronica Paredes
(interactive cultural history of Broadway
theater district in Los Angeles)
Laila Sakr (aka VJ Um Amel)
(data visualization, performance, social
media archiving and analytics)
Susana Ruiz
(games for change; social
justice game design)

59. iMAP PhD dissertations
Jen Stein
(interactive architecture)
Jeff Watson
(environmental game design)
Nonny de la Peña
(immersive journalism)
Jeanne Jo
(feminist-ninja feature film with
remixable narrative structure)

60. Gabriel Peters-Lazaro
“In Camera: a video practice of living, learning and connecting”
IMAX dissertation

61. Samantha Gorman | Pry | 2016
experiments in tactile reading interface

62. http://scalar.usc.edu

63. Thank you
http://technocinema.usc.edu
@ironmanx28
Steve Anderson
sfanders@usc.edu