Finding and Using Moving Images In Context

This week I’m visiting Peter Ditmanson, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, and Dennis Grafflin, Professor of History, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Both have perspectives that lend themselves to this adventure. The syllabus for Grafflin’s History 390L “Shanghai, 1927-1937,” taught last fall, includes this statement of course purpose:

…this class is intended to lead people through the transition from learning out of pre-digested secondary scholarship to generating one’s own insights out of the encounter with primary sources. This confrontation with material generated by people who rarely had any thought of explaining themselves to the future forces one to develop new reading skills, and raises important issues of intellectual craft, academic honesty, and scholarly purpose.

We aspire to offer moving images to a new generation of students who might–unlike earlier eras in the humanities–read amateur film as a text along with other primary sources. Simple. And the metrics are straightforward: the syllabus last year contained no moving images. In future years footage will be offered. We will put forward resources that we intend to be not only useful but used. Citations will be devised and URLs for digital video established. Links will be included among course readings.

On the same road trip I am meeting with Paige Lilly, archivist of the William S. Cohen Papers, Fogler Library, Orono, Maine. See the elegant Cohen finding aid. Lilly has been a research and archival consultant and worked at Northeast Historic Film as collections manager from 1997-2000. She is consulting on indexing for our associated “Moving Image Review Online” project, developing what we intend to be a powerful adjunct to our moving image collections–20 years of narrative relating to collections and their use. “Far East Historic Film” (Summer 2003) on the Joan Branch Collection, Swan family film of Shanghai and environs. Note: the Shanghai Historic House Association Website at the end of the article does not exist.  Moving Image Review article PDF