PROJECT ARCLIGHT - Key Persons
Alex Peer is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pursuing research in the field of virtual reality. He is affiliated with the Computer Science Department and the Living Environments Laboratory at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Peer made a major contribution to Project Arclight by serving as the lead programmer on the final version of the Arclight web app.
A prominent figure in the field of Film and Media Studies, Charles Acland is Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Communication Studies. Acland has written numerous refereed journal articles (for Film History, Cinema Journal, and Screen, among others), book chapters, and books, and was a past editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. His most recent book, Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence, was published in 2012. Acland is also the editor of a number of anthologies, including Useful Cinema (co-edited by Haidee Wasson), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Edited Book in 2013 from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and was a finalist for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. For his 2003 book Screen Traffic, Acland was awarded the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize for Best Book by a Canadian Communication Scholar. He is regularly invited to present his research nationally and internationally (e.g., Western University, Harvard, and the University of Warwick). As a complement to Useful Cinema, in 2011 Acland used digital technology to extend the impact of this research, developing the Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film (CESIF) Archive at Concordia University. He is the principal investigator of the CESIF project, which includes the construction of an on-line research database (MySQL), containing more than 3,000 entries for largely forgotten films. Additionally, Acland is a Co-Director (with Darren Wershler) of the Media History Research Centre. In 2012, he was the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant for his work with "Popular Film and New Media Platforms" and a Québec Government grant (FRQSC) for his research as a co-investigator for ARTHEMIS. Further, for Project Arclight, Acland, the Principal Investigator of the Canadian research team, and Eric Hoyt, the Principal Investigator of the US team, won the 2013 international Digging into Data Challenge Award. For Project Arclight, Acland has established an interdisciplinary team at Concordia with expertise in algorithmic analysis (McKelvey), digital storytelling (Razlogova), and early cinema and database management (Pelletier).
Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon is a PhD Student in the Humanities Program in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. Working in and across English, Communication Studies, and Sociology, Charlotte is interested in popular culture, celebrity and fan culture, literary celebrity, and media theory. Her doctoral research explores how celebrity phenomena are constituted through various discourses that circulate through culture via diverse media channels, investigating what these discourses (and the tension between them) can tell us about the changing constitution of celebrity in Québec, Canada, and beyond our national borders. To do so, she will develop an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon of Leonard Cohen across several decades, arguing that it is no longer possible to consider the literary in isolation from popular culture at large; being a Canadian writer is now inextricable from aspiring to some form of celebrity. Charlotte was the recipient of a Faculty of Arts and Science Graduate Fellowship (2011-2014) and her paper "One by One, the Ghosts Arrive: Celebrity Circulation and Bootleg Aesthetics in I am a Hotel" received an honorary mention for Best Graduate Student Paper at the 2014 Popular Culture Association of Canada Conference. She has written two journal articles, "Between the Fields: Interdisciplinary Humanities Research," published in Inquire (3.2 (2014)) and "The Modern Life of an Ancient Text: The Gospel of Nicodemus in Manitoba" co-written by Zbigniew Izydorczyk in Apocrypha (21 (2010)). She has also written about her research at amplab.ca. For Project Arclight, Charlotte will write for the Arclight website and will be involved in organizing the Symposium, which will take place at Concordia University on May 13-15, 2015.
Derek Long is a Film Studies PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Communication Arts. He earned his MA in Film Studies from Emory University in 2010. In 2013, Long was the recipient of the Helen K. Herman Award for Academic Ability and earlier received a First Year McCarty Scholarship Award in 2010. He has presented conference papers and published articles on the industrial history of Hollywood (e.g., "Television Distribution of Low-Budget Independent Features in the 1950s: The Cases of United Artists v. Strand Productions and Eagle-Lion v. Bogeaus" in Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (2013)). One of his recent projects involved creating the Quantitative Media History Database to collect information pertaining to budgets, revenues, and media circulation. Currently he is a member of the research team for the award winning (2014 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship) Lantern Project as well as Project Arclight (2013 Digging into Data Challenge). As part of Project Arclight, he will serve as Data Curator in the US, working on topic modeling, named entity recognition, and the integration of QMHDB data into the Arclight application. In this capacity, Long will work alongside Peter Gorman, Head of Digital Collections for the University of Wisconsin Libraries and a leading figure in digital archives and text encoding. Long's technical skills include web design (HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver, Photoshop), database work (MySQL, XML, and PHP), video editing (Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, AVID), and digital photography and video production.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the History Department at Concordia University
Elena Razlogova is Associate Professor in the History Department at Concordia University. She is a current researcher and former Co-Director of the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling as well as Director of the Digital History Lab. In 2004-2005, Razlogova was a Postdoctoral Fellow and served as webmaster for the Center of History and New Media at George Mason University. She was awarded the FRQSC's New Researchers Grant (Quebec) (2007-2012) and the SSHRC Image, Text, Sound, and Technology Grant (2007-2008). Additionally, Razlogova received the Concordia University General Research Fund Grants (2006-2007) and a Concordia University Grant for the Digital History Lab (2005-2008). She is the author of The Listener's Voice: The Cultural Economy of Radio, from the Jazz Age to the Cold War (2011) and has a recent book chapter, "The Past and Future of Music Listening: Between Freeform DJs and Recommendation Algorithms," in Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio's Radio's New Wave (2013). One of her current projects involves an international history of surveillance in the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Razlogova has participated in numerous Digital Humanities projects, including Vertov: A Media Annotating Plugin (Executive Producer); Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives (Executive Producer); and The Guantanamobile Project. As a team member of Project Arclight, Razlogova will serve as domain expert in American cultural history, media history, and Digital Humanities in Canada, devoting time to Project Arclight's development and using its new web-based tool to conduct research.
Elise Cotter is completing her MA in Media Studies at Concordia University. Her research focuses on the formulation and branding of "Canadian identity." She is a Research Assistant for the Media History Research Centre and for the CINEMAexpo67 project. She works at Concordia's MILIEUX Institute as well as being its MHRC Student Representative. Before her masters, Cotter worked at Historica Canada, the largest independent organization devoted to enhancing awareness of Canadian history and citizenship.
Job Titles:
- Principal Investigator
- Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Eric Hoyt is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014), co-director of the Media History Digital Library, and lead developer of Lantern, which received the 2014 SCMS Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. His new book project, Motion Papers, combines archival research with data analytics to explore the history of the US motion picture trade press. In collaboration with Charles Acland, Hoyt has been leading the development of Project Arclight.
Fenwick McKelvey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. After receiving his PhD from the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University and York University, McKelvey was appointed Visiting Scholar in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle (2012-2013). From 2006 to 2012, he worked at the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media where he developed software to archive, analyze, and represent electoral politics online. McKelvey was the recipient of a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012) and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC) (2009). His first book, The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (co-authored with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois), was published in 2012. He has also written a number of book chapters and articles for refereed journals and presented papers at national and international conferences (e.g., "Coding ‘Good Technology' for Winning Campaigns" at the Society for Social Studies of Science in Copenhagen, 2012). As a team member, McKelvey brings to Project Arclight methodological and theoretical expertise on Internet data-mining and computational analysis. He will serve as Data Analytics Expert in Canada, developing Arclight's analytic features and collaborating with domain experts for testing early versions of the tool.
Gregory Waller is Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington and past Department Chair (2003-2010). In 2002, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Roma, La Sapienza (Appalachian-Rome Exchange Program). Waller is the recipient of a number of awards, most recently the Indiana University New Frontiers Grant and the College Arts and Humanities Institute Grant for the Orphans Film Symposium (2013). In 2007, he was awarded the Indiana University New Perspectives Grant for Film Conference (Film Indiana: Screening Shorts) and in 2005, the Toshiba Foundation Grant for Museum Exhibition (Japan-in-America, The Turn of the Twentieth Century). In addition to being the editor of the journal Film History since 2012, Waller is the author of Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition (2002) and Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930 (1995), which won the Theatre Library Association Award (1995) and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award of the Society for Cinema Studies for outstanding scholarship in film and media studies (1995-1997). Additionally, Waller has published numerous book chapters (e.g., "Projecting the Power of 16mm, 1935-1945" in Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson's Useful Cinema) and journal articles (e.g., "Narrating the New Japan: The Hero of Liao Yang (1904)" in Screen 47, 2006.) He is currently working on Theatrical Cinema in 1915: Sites, Sponsors, and Circulation, a study of non-theatrical cinema in the US before the advent of 16mm film. Waller will serve on the Advisory Board for Project Arclight.
A computer scientist, Kevin Ponto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Design Studies and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After receiving his PhD in Computer Science Engineering from the University of California-San Diego in 2010, Ponto received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (2010-2012). This research appointment was supported in part by the National Library of Medicine Award. In 2011, he was also an instructor in the Department of Computer Sciences. Through journal articles, book chapters, invited speaking engagements, and conference presentations Ponto has demonstrated and shared his expertise in visualization. This includes, for example, his presentation "Rethinking 3D" at the Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine Seminar in 2012 and a recent co-authored (with M. Gleicher, R. Radwin, and H.J. Shin) journal article, "Perception Calibration for Immersive Display Environments," published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2013). As a team member of Project Arclight, Ponto will lend his expertise to help design and program data visualization alongside Carrie Roy at the UW-Madison.
Kit Hughes is a doctoral candidate of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her MA in Media Studies (Radio-Television-Film Department) from the University of Texas-Austin in 2009. Hughes has been the recipient of a number of honors, including a Chancellor's Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Stephen P. Jarchow Digital Archive Fellowship from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research (WCFTR). From 2011-2014, Hughes worked as an archives assistant at the WCFTR, where she also served as a project assistant on the NHPRC-funded project to reprocess the collection of documentary filmmaker Emile De Antonio. Her work on archival theory, workplace media, and digital aesthetics has been published in American Archivist, Media, Culture & Society, and Film Criticism, respectively. As part of Project Arclight, Hughes will assist Hoyt and Acland in publicizing the project's milestones, producing technical documentation, and serving as a liaison between user experience and the core software developers.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Lea Jacobs is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in film history. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2010-2011), the Kellett Mid-Career Award from the Graduate School at the UW-Madison (2009), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2003). In addition to the forthcoming Trapped in Time: Film Rhythm After Sound, Jacobs is the author of Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film (1991) and The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920 s (2008). She has also written several book chapters (e.g., "Hollywood's Conception of its Audience in the 1920s" (with Andrea Cominskey) in Steve Neale's Classical Hollywood Reader (2012)) as well as articles in refereed journals (e.g., "The Innovation of Re-recording in the Hollywood Studios" published in Film History (2012)), and edited special journal issues (e.g., "Before Screwball," a special issue of Film History (2001)). As a team member of Project Arclight, Jacobs will serve as film history domain expert. Alongside Michele Hilmes, she will investigate historical questions using Arclight, advise on the user experience, and publish journal articles based on the findings.
Job Titles:
- Fellow at Université De Montréal
Louis Pelletier is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Université de Montréal and Concordia University and an instructor in the Département d'histoire de l'art et d'études cinématographiques at Université de Montréal. He earned both his MA and PhD at Concordia. Identifying as a Digital Humanist, he has expertise in early cinema and database management and has coded search engines, built databases, and designed visualizations. In addition to Project Arclight, Pelletier is a member of the research team for the Canadian Educational, Sponsored and Industrial Film Archive project at Concordia where he is currently a research coordinator. His previous work as a research coordinator involved developing numerous online film resources, such as co-designing the Silent Cinema in Quebec, 1896-1930 and Sound Cinema in Quebec: The Talkies and Beyond, 1930-1952 websites. Pelletier co-edited (with Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King and Paul S. Moore) Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema (2012) and has a recent book chapter, "Early Quebec Actualities and the Ephemeral Meanings of Moving Images," in Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer's Cinephemera: Moving Images at the Margins of Canadian Cinema History (2014). As part of Project Arclight, Pelletier will serve as a Data Curator in Canada, working on topic modeling, named entity recognition, and the integration of CESIF data into the Arclight application.
Michele Hilmes is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and current Department Chair. She was the Director of Graduate Studies from 2009 to 2011 and the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research from 2003 to 2010. A historian of broadcasting, she has taught classes on various aspects of broadcast texts, industry, and representation for over twenty years. Hilmes was the recipient of a Fullbright Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham in 2013-2014 and was previously awarded the Resident Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison (2010), the Helm Fellowship at Indiana University (2010), and Grant-in-Aid at the Rockefeller Archive Center (2009). Publishing extensively, she has written book chapters (e.g., "The New Vehicle of Nationalism: Radio Goes to War" in Russ Castronova and Jonathan Auerback's Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (2013)), articles for referred journals (e.g., "‘The North Atlantic Triangle': Britain, the US, and Canada in 1950s Television" in Media History (2010)), and authored several books, notably Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011), Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922 to 1952 (1997), and Hollywood Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (1999). Hilmes also edited the anthology NBC: America's Network (2007) and coedited (with Jason Loviglio) a new collection of essays, Radio's New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era (2013). Most recently, the 4th edition of her textbook Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States was published (2014). As a team member of Project Arclight, Hilmes will serve as broadcasting history domain expert in the US.
Paul Moore is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and serves as Ryerson Director of the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture with York University (2012-2015). His research interests include media history, urban studies, newspapers, and film exhibition. In 2010, he received the Provost's Experiential Teaching Award and in 2009, the Canadian Communication Association awarded his book, Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun, the Gertrude J. Robinson Prize for Best Book Published in 2008. Moore has published several book chapters, most recently "The Flow of Amusement: The First Year of Cinema in the Red River Valley" in Conway and Pasch's Borderlands and Breaking Points: Tension Across the 49th Parallel (2014) and has written articles for the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and the Canadian Journal of Communication. His book (co-authored book with Sandra Gabriele), The Sunday Paper: The Print Circulation of Magazine, Film, and Radio Features in North America, 1888-1922, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Moore will serve on the Advisory Board for Project Arclight.
Job Titles:
- Head of Digital Collections for the University of Wisconsin - Madison Libraries
A Digital Archivist, Peter Gorman is the Head of Digital Collections for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries where he manages the program for digital collections. The libraries contain 70 collections comprising more than 2.5 million digital objects. Gorman holds a Master's degree in Library and Information Science, with an emphasis on information systems technologies, and has shared his research through numerous publications and conference presentations, including a paper on digital collections infrastructure at the 2010 Council of University of Wisconsin Libraries Conference. Gorman serves a pivotal role as the Head of Digital Collections. He designs technical architecture for digital repositories, workflow, resource discovery, preservation, and associated infrastructure; manages software development for digital collection infrastructure and access; assists in developing and coordinating IT strategies for university libraries; and represents UW-Madison and the University of Wisconsin System on consortial and international committees concerned with digital library services and technologies. A leading figure in digital archives and text encoding, in Project Arclight Gorman will collaborate with PhD student Derek Long on data preservation.
Rachel MacNeill is a second year Master of Arts in Media Studies student at Concordia University. She was awarded the Graduate Fellowship for Ethnic Studies and Society Diversity from Concordia University Faculty of Arts and Science (2013-2014). Her current projects include an analysis of depictions of racialized youth in contemporary Canadian news media and participatory action research with indigenous girls in the Northwest Territories. As a team member of Project Arclight, MacNeill will be contributing to digitizing and archiving historical newspapers and magazines for Arclight's new web-based research tool as well as research and writing for the Arclight website and symposium.
Robert Hunt is a second-year master's student in media studies at Concordia University. His current research analyzes the ways digital media producers manage user data and employ emotional rhetoric as strategies for negotiating the algorithmic control of attention on platforms such as Facebook and Google. Hunt's role on Project Arclight has primarily been to provide manuscript editing and proofreading during the production of The Arclight Guidebook.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California 's ( USC ) School of Cinematic Arts
Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California's (USC) School of Cinematic Arts. She is an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department, serves on the Gender Studies Advisory Board at USC's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and is the Founding Editor of the journal Vectors as well as the International Journal of Learning and Media. McPherson is the recipient of numerous awards, honors, and grants. The Mellon Foundation in particular has been a major funder for her current research project, the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture project. Her book Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003) won the John Cawelti Award for Outstanding Book of 2003 from the American Culture Association. McPherson's most recent book is Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, co-authored with Marsha Kinder (2014). Currently, she is preparing the manuscript, The Vectors of Vectors, for Harvard University Press. McPherson is also the lead PI for the software development of Scalar, a new platform for multimodal publication, which moved to open beta in March 2013. Scalar is in process with the Vector's development team and is supported by the Mellon Foundation. McPherson will serve on the Advisory Board for Project Arclight.
Tony Tran is a Media and Cultural Studies PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Communication Arts. He was awarded a Fulbright Student Research Fellowship in Vietnam at the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema (2010-2011). During this time, he conducted ethnographic research on informal media networks while working in pirate DVD shops around Hanoi. He is currently a member of the Editorial Board for the graduate student academic journal The Velvet Light Trap and a Contributing Editor for the media and cultural studies blog Antenna. As a team member of Project Arclight, Tran will serve as Lead Software Developer in the US. His technical skills include web design (HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver, Photoshop), video editing (Adobe Premiere), and programming languages (Javascript, JQuery, XSLT).
Tyler Morgenstern is a second-year Master's student in Media Studies at Concordia University. Concerned with how the material, discursive, and affective conditions of (settler) colonialism and white supremacy shape experiences of intimacy in the contemporary moment, his thesis research (supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) explores themes of embodiment, place, and race in recent works of media and screen art by racialized and Indigenous artists working Canada. Situating these works in the context of a post-9/11 Canada marked by dramatic shifts in the organization of citizenship, immigration, national security, and surveillance policy, he explores how particular aesthetic practices, by recasting the ways in which viewers experience space, throw into relief the material specificity of the contemporary Canadian state's "atmospheric bordering regime," disclosing and contesting its racialized, colonial, and gendered disciplinary valences. Morgenstern is also a member of the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia University, and, along with several scholars and artists from throughout the Americas, is currently in the early phases of a collaborative writing project focused on the aesthetic, political, and methodological possibilities bound up in the notion of trespass. As a member of the Arclight team, Morgenstern will be assisting in the digitization of selected archival materials and supporting the coordination of the Arclight symposium.