Collaborations

At Kinolab, our interests in establishing a data model of film language (see Tags) and training artificial intelligence to identify aspects of film language are sustained by activities facilitated here, on our web platform: a public facing, searchable database of annotated film and media clips. Kinolab.org is designed to encourage formal as well as informal academic crowdsourcing to develop a collection of film language examples broadly representative of narrative film and media. By making possible the academic crowdsourcing of clips, the platform offers the entire community of film and media studies scholars and students the opportunity to develop a collection (dataset) for film language research, without restrictions linked to genre, directors, national cinemas, etc. The project’s openness to different kinds of narrative film and media contributions and collaborations will increase future researchers’ ability to analyze film language across many different axes of interpretation. For this reason, we are eager to work with a variety of academic partners in different contexts, from film and media faculty and their students to specific research projects compatible with our objectives.

For example, Kinolab is currently partnered with Computing Ethics Narratives, a project led by computer science, philosophy, and cinema studies faculty and funded by the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computer Science Challenge to build a collection of narrative film and series clips related to technology and ethics. This collaboration has yielded over seven hundred annotated clips from works like 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968), Ex Machina (Garland 2015), and Black Mirror (Brooker 2011-2019). Our partnership serves the Computing Ethics Narratives project by making available expertly curated, thematically relevant clips to computer science faculty engaged in teaching technology and ethics. It serves Kinolab’s core research on film language by allowing project curators to build a robust dataset around the use of film language in science fiction films and series.

If you have a current or future research project compatible with Kinolab’s mission and are interested in learning more about a potential partnership, please contact project director Allison Cooper (acooper@bowdoin.edu).