Report | 14. October 2024

NFDI4Culture at the annual conference of the German Society for Media Studies 2024

By Dr. Alexander Stark and Andrea Polywka, M. A.

The German Society for Media Studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft) invited participants to its annual conference at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from September 25 to 28, 2024. The conference focussed on the topic of "versammeln" (gather). NFDI4Culture participated in the event with two contributions: On the one hand, Andrea Polywka (Cultural Research Data Academy, CRDA) presented our consortium as part of the panel "Heterogene Filmbestände einheitlich verknüpfen | Mehrwerte für filmgetriebene (medien-)wissenschaftliche Forschung schaffen" (Uniformly linking heterogeneous film collections | creating added value for film-driven (media) studies research), which was organized by the DFG-funded project AV-EFI (Automated interlocking system for audiovisual holdings via uniform film identifiers). The panel was co-moderated by Alexander Stark (CRDA).

On the other hand, the team of the Cultural Research Data Academy organized the discussion panel "Filmdaten sammeln, sichern und nutzen" (Collecting, securing and using film data) together with the media studies repository media/rep/. Matti Stöhr (TIB Hannover), Skadi Loist (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf), Adriane Meusch (Universität Bayreuth) and Kristina Rose (DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum) gave short inputs on various aspects of the topic:

Skadi Loist presented a case study about changes in student film works of the HFF/Film Universität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in the years 1985–99 in the context of the data competence center QUADRIGA. The challenges here lie in the fact that the data collection has grown historically at an institution that was subject to political upheavals and used different library systems. These circumstances make it difficult to gain an overview of the existing data and to make the collection usable for research and teaching.

Thereafter, Adriane Meusch provided an insight into the work processes of the DFG-funded project "Das Film-Manifest. Geschichte, Ästhetik und Medialität einer aktivistischen Form" (The Film Manifesto. History, Aesthetics and Mediality of an Activist Form). She reported that the project was originally planned without an explicit focus on data, and that it only became clear during the course of the work that the researchers involved were collecting a lot of data. This resulted in the creation of a separate database, which is used, among other things, to index the content of the manifestos. As in many other research projects, the participants are faced with the question of what to do with the project database and the collected data after the end of the project funding.

A further input was provided by Kristina Rose, who reported on her working practice in the field of data aggregation from the perspective of a data coordinator at the DFF. In light of the fact that the comparison and cleansing of data takes a lot of time, she asked herself whether the data actually reaches the researchers who are supposed to use it via the “classic” aggregation portals. One possible way to increase the use of filmographic data would be to enrich it with research findings, whereby data provenance would play a major role.

In the final input, Matti Stöhr provided insights into the structure of the AV-EFI project and, in particular, the close collaboration with the film heritage institutions involved in the project. Heterogeneous film collections and different indexing practices in the institutions are proving to be factors that make close coordination necessary in the creation of uniform film identifiers as the “lowest common denominator”.

The subsequent discussion with the participants, which was moderated by Malte Hagener (CRDA/Philipps University of Marburg), focused on topics such as machine interfaces, cooperation between research and infrastructure institutions and the different approaches to dealing with metadata schemas and associated manuals in practice. It became clear that the very diverse GLAM institutions and research projects have different requirements for dealing with film data and identifiers in everyday research and work, but that there is also a desire for manageable manuals for data acquisition and metadata enrichment. It was also discussed whether the widespread availability of AI models, which can also be used for automatic data enrichment and metadata enrichment, could potentially be a game changer.

In summary, the Cultural Research Data Academy and media/rep/ will remain committed to developing and implementing new perspectives for future forms of participation and exchange with film heritage institutions, subject-specific research projects and the consortium's existing services. The aim is to create additional opportunities for access to film data and collections. This will include a close exchange with the newly created FID Media.