This week, I chose to deconstruct the DH project, Early African American Film. The database describes and discusses the history of silent race films from a vast gathering of information drawn from both primary and secondary sources. The team defined a silent race film as one that was made up of African America cast members, was produced by an independent, African American owned production company, and was advertised as a race film in the press. The project details information not only on the films, but also on the actors, directors, production companies, and paraphernalia created by the race film industry, including posters and theater programs. The team that worked on this database intended to demonstrate the craft behind African American silent filmmaking while also providing insight into the community as a whole in order to promote awareness on this era of film history.
The project only included data on films created between 1909 and 1930 and that were intended for African American audiences. The data was gathered from various African American film collections and archives located in the United States that both documented the history and culture of African American film traditions and contained rare moving images and recordings of silent reels. Additionally, the team also amassed data from scholarly essays and texts that traced the emergence of African American filmmaking and analyzed the filmography and role of race films in the early 1900s.
The team assembled a database of all of the people that were associated with the silent race film industry. As the connections between the people grew stronger and more complex, the team began to process the data using visualizations that (1) exhibited the number of silent race films and the year that they premiered, (2) showed a network of people associated with the films, including actors, directors, writers, and others that were somehow involved in the industry, and (3) displayed the locations of African American production companies and the year in which they were founded.
The data that detailed the number of race films was presented as a histogram chart, showing that the peak of race film production (51 documented premieres) took place in 1921.
The network of people in the silent race film industry was displayed in two different diagrams. Connections were shown by an edge if two people worked together on at least one film, and were darker if they worked together more than once. Nodes, which signified individual people, were larger if one person had many connections with other people in the industry. The second diagram indicated the ways in which people were connected, displaying which film connected any two people together.
The data that presented the locations of the African American production companies was exhibited in one moving and one still time map. In the moving time map, production companies appear as pulsing dots as the time key moves year-by-year in their geographical location on a map of the United States, while the still map is one image that shows the expansions of the companies.
This was awesome! I enjoyed how thoroughly you explained the project and its source, allowing me to build up a great deal of interest in how the data would be presented. Your incorporation of images within the text allowed me to better visualize what you were talking about; that being said I could truly see how connected people were in the industry. As someone who never knew about the existence of this industry, I was better able to understand its framework through your organized breakdown of the project.
I can clearly tell your blog post has been carefully crafted! Very well organized with a clear story. The plentiful pictures were especially helpful in visualizing exactly the point you were trying to make. Perhaps, some minor addition to the blog post I would add is some sort of labeling: “Sources, Processes, and Presentation” to make the post even easier to read and more organized. Also, perhaps the introduction part was way too long.
I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I thought you did a good job showing how the project members gathered information on the films and put all of it together. I also appreciated how you break down the different data presentations and what the various symbols and labels represented. I didn’t do my blog post on this website, but yours helped me to navigate it better and understand the content.
I used “Early African American Film” for my blog post as well, and I think that upon reading your blog post it shows what I missed for my own. I thought your delineation of the processes citing how the visualizations 1) showed the # of films 2) showed the network of people and 3) displayed the location of the film companies was really helpful in explaining the visualizations. I also thought your inclusion of the screenshots for each step was very beneficial for your post as a a whole.
I thought that your blog post on Early African American Film was done very well. You did an exceptional job in providing the sources that were used and how the creators of this DH project gathered their information. In addition to this, you did a good job in displaying the methods that were used to represent the data and explaining which data and topics were being represented with each particular method. Furthermore, by going into detail on some of the diagrams presented, I was able to get a better sense of what the creators were using them for and understand the point that they were trying to convey with this project.
I think your post did a great job on helping me understand each type of chart and its purpose for that specific dataset. I appreciated that your screenshots included a zoomed in version to show the details of diagrams featuring a vast and complex network of people in the silent race film industry.
I thought this was a really great and well thought out blog post. Even though I didn’t personally work on this database, your in-depth explanations of each of the sites various aspects and visualizations really helped me thoroughly understand it. One minor critique that I would have would be if you might be able to hyperlink you’re images used in future blog posts so I can directly click on the image to go to the relevant page.
You broke down your analysis nicely and the post was very easy to follow. I did not explore this project for my own analysis, but your in-depth review gave new insight and made it easy to to navigate the site. When I did explore the website, I found that your review of the diagrams, particularly the mapping made it easier for myself (and others) to digest and eliminate distractions in order to focus on the information presented.
This blog post was so helpful in understanding the breadth of the content of the site. The included photos really contributed to the narrative you crafted in experiencing the site, too. It’s interesting to see how someone chooses to describe a media and their experience with the presented narrative/information, as it is a narrative in itself, as well.
I thought your post was very informative and detailed. Although I did not write my blog on this article, your blog has helped me gain some understanding of the race film industry. You included a variety of different screen shots, which allows your post to be easily understood and allows you to be able to easily explain you interpretation and opinion on the website.