About Kinolab.org

Our primary objective in developing Kinolab.org is to create a rich, DMCA-compliant platform for the analysis of narrative media clips that are annotated to highlight distinctive uses of film language. The platform, designed to facilitate comparisons across clips, features advanced search options that can handle everything from simple keyword searches to searches using filters and Boolean terms. The Search function queries all of the fields associated with a clip in Kinolab’s database, including informational metadata from TMDb.com for film and series episode entries as well as content metadata supplied by Kinolab curators and contributors. A secondary objective is to academically crowdsource clips by making it easy for faculty and student users to contribute their own legally obtained narrative media clips via the site’s Contribute page. Academic crowdsourcing is standardized via a controlled vocabulary of film language terms. Kinolab curators – project faculty, staff, and students – evaluate and edit submitted clips and their metadata and approve or reject submissions to the collection.

Kinolab’s policy regarding fair use and the DMCA builds upon the assertive stances toward fair use and the DMCA adopted by fellow DH practitioners working with audiovisual materials. Kinolab’s policy also reflects (and benefits from) loosening restrictions authorized by the Librarian of Congress in triennial rounds of exemptions to the DMCA. These have shifted gradually from an outright ban to broader exemptions in 2015 for “college and university faculty and students engaged in film studies classes or other courses requiring close analysis of film and media excerpts” (Federal Register 2015, 65949) and, in 2018, for “college and university faculty and students […] for the purpose of criticism, comment, teaching, or scholarship” (Federal Register 2018, 54018). Kinolab metadata is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC), which gives users permission to remix, adapt, and build upon our work as long as their new works acknowledge Kinolab and are non-commercial in nature.

Our Team

Project Director

Allison Cooper is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. Her research is on film language, with a focus on how digital and computational methodologies can increase our understanding of narrative cinema and media as a system of communication. Professor Cooper’s research interests also include modern and contemporary Italian cinema and culture. Her publications on digital humanities approaches to film analysis and Italian cinema have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Italianist Film Issue, the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Italian Culture, Annali d’Italianistica, and various edited collections

Lead Collaborator, Digital and Computational Studies

Fernando Nascimento is Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies at Bowdoin College, where he teaches an introductory course on digital and computational studies along with computation in context and digital text analysis. His work on ethics and hermeneutics in the writings of Paul Ricoeur has been published in Storyworlds:A Journal of Narrative Studies and Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies. As co-director of the digital portal Digital Ricoeur, he is developing a template for advanced textual analytics that can be re-instantiated for the works of other thinkers and by other scholarly communities. He brings nearly 20 years of private-sector experience in software development to his work advising Bowdoin faculty on how to develop their own digital projects and techniques.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IT Development

David Francis

is Senior Interactive Developer in Academic Technology and Consulting at Bowdoin College, where his work to increase public access to institutional data has included making public domain images from the Bowdoin Museum of Art available for download, incorporating GPS data into the records of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, and creating a crowd-sourced tagging toolset to help improve searchability of the Museum of Art’s collections. He brings experience with database administration and software development to his development work on Kinolab.

Student Curator

Eduardo Mendoza is a member of the Bowdoin class of 2024.

Student Curator

Phoebe Marin

Kinolab has been made possible through the support of Bowdoin College, in particular the Office of Academic Technology and Consulting, the Office of the Dean of Academic Affairs, and the Department of Digital and Computational Studies, along with funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The addition of film and series clips relating to contemporary technology has been supported by the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, a partnership of Omidyar Network, Mozilla, Schmidt Futures and Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Our Advisory Board

John P. Bell, Assistant Professor of Digital Curation, University of Maine and Associate Director of the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth College

Stacy Doore, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colby College

Jason Mittell, Professor of Film and Media Culture and Faculty Director of Digital Liberal Arts Initiative at Middlebury College

Mark Williams, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth College

For More Information

Contact Project Director Allison Cooper in the Cinema Studies Program at Bowdoin College, 7800 College Station, Brunswick, Maine 04011 or via email at acooper@bowdoin.edu.