Early African American Film 
This project attempts to catalogue and articulate the African American Silent Race filmmaking tradition from the onset of the major motion picture industry in 1909 until the coming of sound in the late 1920’s, effectively limiting the scope of study to films made 1909-1930. The team examined the unique challenges faced by black filmmakers during this period with an eye toward understanding the production cycle, audiences, actors and other attribute of a filmmaking landscape that is often overlooked in contemporary and historical cinema studies. While “Race Film” is a designation that applies globally to films produced in the first half of the 20th century for black audiences, the team limited the date range of the study to better examine the early silent film years of this particular genre.
Source material for the project reveals a set of challenges that are endemic to the study of the silent film era but magnified exponentially in the study of this less-documented and studied subgenre; a great deal of the films themselves have been lost to time. The team attempted to create a window into the genre through the use of historical archives (sources), preserved footage (see film), and to create through the exploration of past and current scholarship a comprehensive definition of what constitutes African American Race film (definition).
The data was presented in an Airtable spreadsheet searchable by filmmaker, film title, production company or source material used (see table here). The project team included a comprehensive set of tutorials to help users sort and filter data according to their individual needs (tutorials). These tutorials guide users in the particulars of using the spreadsheet data, creating individually tailored maps reflecting the research, or the creation of a network graph to model the information.
Presentation of the information is particularly effective in the capacity of site visitors to interact with the material and extract what they need in different forms. Information can be filtered and presented in histogram, network model or map form in addition to the data tables presented in the spreadsheet. The information can be sorted along a timeline as necessary to have a more exact idea of the industry trend in a specific year. The home page of the website contains a direct link to the history page that contextualizes the history and ongoing study of this silent Race filmmaking tradition and facilitating in some ways greater specificity in subsequent searches by providing background information on the movement and major players.
Solid blog post! I appreciated how you discussed the struggles in getting the source material for this digital humanities project. I’m interested in what sort of processes they used to get all of these old films into a digital format. Overall this is a solid blog post. I felt like I received a good grasp of the project.
It was very convenient how you hyperlinked each example and reference so that we can correlate your description with the actual content of the website itself. You seem to have a solid understanding of how to navigate the presentation, but it would also be helpful to include screenshots of the charts, maps, etc. that you mentioned so that we can also visualize the process.