{"id":569,"date":"2016-10-03T13:48:09","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T20:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=569"},"modified":"2016-10-03T13:48:09","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T20:48:09","slug":"deconstruction-of-early-african-american-film-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/03\/deconstruction-of-early-african-american-film-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Deconstruction of Early African American Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I chose to deconstruct the DH project, Early African American Film<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The project only included data on films created between 1909 and 1930\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"screen-shot-2016-10-03-at-1-40-33-pm\"
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

\"screen-shot-2016-10-03-at-1-43-39-pm\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"screen-shot-2016-10-03-at-1-44-17-pm\"<\/p>\n

\"screen-shot-2016-10-03-at-1-44-23-pm\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"eaa-time-map-768x566\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Deconstruction of Early African American Film”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}