Mining the Dutch Movie Landscape in Historical Newspapers
Supervisors: Kaspar Beelen, Kathleen Lotze, Ivan Kisjes en Thunnis van Oort
DIGIFIL aims to digitise and publish the Dutch “Filmladders” (the weekly listings of movie showtimes at local cinema theatres or other venues). The screenings constitute the focal point of film culture: they are the place where distributors, exhibitors and audiences meet. Collecting information about these encounters yields an invaluable resource for linguists, socio-economic historians and media scholars to study the ways in which cinema-going contributed to the formation of modern societies.
This project builds upon the digitization effort of the Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, henceforth KB). Their current collection, available via Delpher, already contains an impressive set of digitized, segmented and enriched newspapers. The point of DIGIFIL is to improve digitization and enrichment of cultural agendas (mainly the Filmladders) embedded in the newspaper corpus. we use the available digitized materials as a starting point but refine and extend them wherever that is required, using existing tools developed by CLARIAH Work Package 3 (PICCL, TICCL, FROG).
Article: Digital Film Listings (DIGIFIL): Automatically Extracting Film Programming Information from Digitised Newspapers