I chose to reverse engineer the website Early African American Film, which aims to reconstruct the history of African American silent race films, before the 1930s, through a database. This database was put together by drawing from multiple primary and secondary sources and consists of the films, the actors involved, and the production companies. Race films are essentially movies created for African American audiences featuring an all African American cast.
The team created the database using multiple primary and secondary sources like the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection in UCLA’s Special Collections, Mayme Agnew Clayton Collection of African-American History and Culture at the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum (MCLM), and so on. These collections consist of varied media such as production documents, newspaper and magazine clippings, and posters. The team personally went through these and noted which items fit their criteria of a race film.
After filtering through the sources and digitalizing the data that was required for this project, the team presented the data in a table format. The team also documented pictures of the items they deemed necessary. The database was created using Airtable, and consists of four main tabs: People, Films, Companies, and Sources. This table provides easy usability through features like ability to filter, group and modify the data to download for the user’s own purpose. There are also tutorials on the website to help the user create their own visualizations with the data.
The data is presented in multiple ways on this website and is categorized by films, people, and production companies. The films are illustrated by a histogram depicting the number of films premiered each year during the specific time period. The people are depicted in two interactive visualizations, one where you can view which people are connected through films and the second where you can see how they are connected. The production companies are represented by a time map that shows the regions where production companies were founded each year.
Overall, this website is extremely user oriented and encourages the user to work with the data and expand on it. It is very efficiently organized and easy to use and understand. It also does a very good job of explaining the data and increase interest in the subject of African American silent race films.
I thought this was a very well written post. I enjoyed that you included a picture of each data visualization so that the reader gets a better understanding of how the data was processed and presented without having to visit the site itself. That being said, I was inspired to check out the actual website given that I wrote about a different project and am now curious to learn more about Early African American Film.
The author demonstrates a thorough understanding of the assignment and covers the required points with four screenshots. The article is also aware of how the creators started from scratch by defining the key term. Noticeably the data in the platform refer only to some aspects of the films when they were released. The content, subject matters or genres of those films seem to be not shown on the database. In this sense, the website functions as an index for anyone interested in the subject. And it has a great potential to develop into a bigger project.
Baoli