Film
Film is a category of material, a photographic material, a medium for documents. Its history goes back to 1895.
As is the case with other media is film used by artists to develop particular
genres. This is the reason film is primarily a discipline within arts and
humanities: As long as a technology is new are the technical aspects in
particular object of research. When a technology grows old, the technical
aspects become more trivial, but the particular genres associated with the
technology are still of interest. Silent films is an example, which documents
this point.
Librarianship and information management are interested in
film as a part of their cultural mediation, in problems concerning preservation,
their representation and retrieval in databases and so on.
An example of research on film-retrieval is provided by Leazer; Furner & Napper (2003). They described the use of three alternative methods for ranking films for information retrieval (IR). A large film-person incidence matrix is generated using the principle cast, directors, producers and screenwriters for each film. These attributes are used to measure film-film distances by creating a distance matrix: two films are considered to be adjacent if there is any overlap in the people associated with each film.
Literature:
Andrew, D. (1989). Film theory. Vol. 2, pp. 173-176 IN: International Encyclopedia of Communications Vol. 1-4. Ed. by Erik Barnouw et al. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leazer, G.H.; Furner, J. & Napper, R. (2003). Three social distance measures for film. ASIST 2003: Proceedings of the 66th ASIST Annual Meeting, 40, 21-27.
Harrison, H. W. (1992). Who, What, Where, When and Why - Access to films through the catalog. IFLA Journal, 18(3), 238-242.
Hertzum, M. (2003). Requests for information from a film archive: a case study of multimedia retrieval. Journal of Documentation, 59(2), 168-186.
National Film Preservation Foundation (2004). The film preservation guide; the basics for archives, libraries, and museums. San Francisco, Calif.: National Film Preservation Foundation, U.S.
Pearson, S.(2000). The century of film: bibliographic control and legal deposit of the moving image. ASLIB Proceedings, 52(7), 247-253.
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 22-01-2006