As a follow up to our Database of Films, Artworks, and other Visual Culture Products (D2.4), we describe the particular methods that we have applied during our work on the collection in each field (films, artworks, graphic novels, video games and Internet memes). Those methodologies correspond with the theoretical and methodological frameworks of digital curation, as outlined in previous deliverables.
In this deliverable we introduce the concept of digital visual history as a methodological framework. We outline its characteristics and claim that it reflects central cultural shifts in contemporary research on “old” audiovisual media objects in “new” digital media infrastructures. As such, it also promotes the development of new methods for their digital apprehension. In the VHH project’s effort to preserve, analyze and communicate the visual and audiovisual records captured by Allied cameraman during and after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, we explore the ways how digital media infrastructures meet historical media objects and affect them. In doing so, digital media infrastructures provide tools and initiate practices in a variety of areas (selection, search, metadata collection) and in doing so establish a framework for digital visual historiography.
Within this framework, we have developed versatile yet consistent methods for images collection, annotation, analysis, and curation. Each data set of the various media assets that constitute our collection focuses on the medium’s own specific characters and the ability and possibilities to be remediated in the VHH-MMSI.
