Teaching

Kinolab welcomes clips from fellow film and media scholars and their students, whose contributions actively shape the corpus of narrative film and media represented in the collection. Site users that have benefited from the collection in their own research and teaching can ‘pay it forward’ by adding their own clips, showing that they value this unique open access project and increasing Kinolab’s value for other users.

Academic crowdsourcing at Kinolab is a collective scholarly activity that builds upon traditional modes of film and media studies research. Faculty and student contributors to the project engage in close readings of the clips they submit via the annotation and tagging functions built into the platform. Submitted clips then undergo peer review by Kinolab curators before being officially added to the project’s database. The qualitative, hermeneutic work of individual contributors forms a basis for the quantitative analysis of film language at Kinolab, where we are exploring the application of digital methodologies made possible by emerging technologies such as machine learning and visualization techniques for the interpretation of large moving image data sets.

Engaging your students in Kinolab’s academic crowdsourcing efforts provides them with the opportunity to sharpen analytical skills through close readings of narrative film and television: a prerequisite of accurate, thorough clip annotation and tagging. It also provides them with the opportunity to learn how to digitize or re-mediate moving images while familiarizing them with best practices for fair use and copyright—skills and knowledge that they can transfer to emerging forms of film and media criticism such as videographic essays and desktop documentaries. Finally, it allows them to join Kinolab’s international user base of film and media faculty and students, fostering a sense of engagement with the global study of film language as well as a sense of public ownership and responsibility for the ongoing success of the project.

Below are models for incorporating Kinolab into your film and media studies curriculum. Faculty interested in developing a formal collaboration with Kinolab can read about a recent project focusing on Hindi-language cinema (“Hooray for Bollywood”), or email project director Allison Cooper (acooper@bowdoin.edu) to learn more. If you have already incorporated Kinolab into your teaching and are willing to share details or materials of the model you used, please get in touch so that we can add them to this list, where others may benefit from them.

Model One

Model Two