Examining Early African American Film

I chose to reverse engineer Early African American Film, a DH project and collaborative database that operates by using primary and secondary to
sources to ‘reconstruct’ the silent race film community of the early 20th  century. Race films were created for African-American audiences, aiming to showcase narratives by and for African-Americans. Most of the actual films have been lost or destroyed, and thus evidence of their existence is pulled from newspaper advertisements, posters, and other paraphernalia surrounding the film. Early African American Film works with these evidential primary and secondary sources to create a dataset that showcases Actors, Films, Companies, and their relationships.

This project pulled from a variety of primary sources such as newspaper clippings, posters, and advertisements that were pulled from archives such as the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection at UCLA. The group chose its own criteria it deemed fit for project inclusion and verified the primary sources via scanned digital copy. It credited other archives such as the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, The Black Film Archive at Indiana University, Pearl Bowser Collection at the Smithsonian, and Umbra. Secondary sources were also used for the data, utilizing essays, actor profiles, and scholarly works by several different authors that examine race films in depth.

After scanning the primary resources from archives into a digital format and using the secondary sources to further construct the database comprised of the actors, films, and companies that made up the community of race films the project chose to process the data in spreadsheet format. The “relational database” is hosted by Airtable and can be downloaded in CSV (comma-separated value document) format to be opened up in a separate application. The curated database contains the information found in the primary archives and scholarly essays in a table format, including the scanned copies of the film paraphernalia.

This database was then presented to visitors as more of a tool that can be user-manipulated rather than an exhaustive representation of the relationships that made up the race film industry. The table is simple and relatively basic in its presentation; however, the project provided a slew of different tutorials of what researches are able to do with the data at their own leisure. In addition, the project offers a few different visualization tools such as a bar graph showcasing the number of race films produced in a given year and a network graph created on Cytoscape (also included a tutorial on how to create your own).

As a visitor to the database with no prior knowledge about silent race films, I personally enjoyed the page that provided an in-depth explanation as to what race films actually are. I feel as though other DH projects that I have worked with seem to be created for audiences already familiar with the subject, so I enjoyed being able to familiarize myself with the topic before diving in to the data. I found the data to be presented efficiently, although I was a bit overwhelmed by having to constantly be looking to different windows for a tutorial on how to properly work with it. I also personally appreciated their detailed list of sources, especially for this particular blog post, because it was very clear and concise on how their information was retrieved and presented.