Karel Dibbets (Amsterdam)

Culture in Context

Cinema Context is a website and a research tool for the history of film culture in the Netherlands www.cinemacontext.nl, financed by the national research organization NWO. It provides basic information about the Who, What, Where and When of film exhibition and distribution from its beginnings to the present. At the same time, it allows researchers to analyze the available data and to study patterns and networks, the DNA of film culture. In this paper, I’ll explain the next stage in the development of Cinema Context as it is about to join two newly funded projects. The first project, Culture in Context, will explore new ways to interconnect Cinema Context with digital heritage collections of two city archives and the Theatre Institute of the Netherlands. Cinema Context is used as a model and offers a perspective for sharing knowledge between archives and researchers. The second project will add an educational dimension to Cinema Context: the website will provide students with online instructions how to download data and use a database for further analysis.