Interviews on Data Practices and Categorizations in Film History. An Introduction

In this paper, we propose interviews as a method for documenting data provenance and making contextual information of film historical and other cultural heritage data available. Through interrogating and documenting data practices, film historical databases are not only examined as research tools but also historicized and situated within their specific institutional and local contexts. Building on “datasheets for datasets” (Gebru et al. 2021) and “datasheets for digital cultural heritage datasets” (Alkemade et al. 2023), we introduce a set of questions for evaluating the available information on a specific dataset, which can serve as a starting point for developing case-specific interview guidelines. Based on our own research, we emphasize the importance of analyzing datasets for the uncertainties and gaps they may contain. Through interviewing data editors, archivists, project managers, and software developers, we aim to shed a light on their work, which often remains invisible but nevertheless has a major impact on film historical information infrastructures and thus on knowledge production. The paper introduces an interview series on data practices, provenance, and categorizations in film history initiated by the research group „Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History“ (DAVIF) (2021–2025), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The goal of the research group is to explore data visualizations in order to tell different stories differently. With our interview series, we pursue three primary objectives: (1) to provide insights into the data practices of our project partners – the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) and the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, and the early feminist film database project f_films, (2) to contribute to current debates on data provenance and research data management in film and media studies, and (3) to increase the visibility of film historical research agendas within the broader field of digital humanities. The interview series: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17233942 The project website: https://uni-marburg.de/Q85oo