Visualpedia

The Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) was a major international film research project of exceptional duration and scope that officially existed from 1952 to 1990. It belonged to the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen, which produced, distributed, and archived films for scientists, universities, and research institutes. The EC was intended as an encyclopaedia of cinematographically recorded movements from biology, ethnology, and the technical sciences. Ultimately, it comprised over 3,000 films by hundreds of scientists.

In 2010, the IWF was dissolved, and the collection was transferred to the Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover (TIB), which digitized the collection and made most of it available online via its AV media portal. Making the films accessible online offers both opportunities and risks and is proving to be legally and ethically complex.

How can such a film collection be researched? The transdisciplinary research project Visualpedia. ‘Atlas Encyclopaedia Cinematographica’ and the Visual Science and Technology Studies (SNSF, 09/2022–09/2026, University of Lucerne, Science Studies) focuses on two main aspects: first, the historical-critical analysis of the collection’s history, and second, the question of how to deal with a partly ‘sensitive’ film collection whose roots go back to National Socialism and whose films were partly made in colonial contexts.

In the sense of visual STS (Galison 2014), which understands the visual as a central part of scholarly work and seeks to analyze and activate it in its media specificities, we developed various interfaces to make the collection accessible to researchers and the public in its structure, aesthetics, and mediality, as well as in its encyclopedic ambitions. Using the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica as an example, we ultimately use these interfaces to engage with a question: “What is it to tell history under the conditions of digital media?” (Halpern 2015, 20)