How can a vast and historically complex film collection be researched? 

The transdisciplinary research project Visualpedia focuses on the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) and addresses two main aspects: first, a historical-critical analysis of the collection’s history; and second, the challenges of engaging with a partly ‘sensitive’ film collection whose roots go back to National Socialism and some of whose films were produced in colonial contexts. The EC was an internationally assembled collection of scientific and ethnographic films that was extensive in scope and officially existed from 1952 to 1990. It was part of 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 encyclopedia 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 EC was transferred to the Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover (TIB), which digitized the films in high quality and made most of them 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.

In the sense of Visual STS, which understands the visual as a central part of scholarly work and seeks to analyze and activate it in its media-specificities, Visualpedia develops different ways of making the collection visible and open to critical inquiry. Alongside scholarly publications, we developed various interfaces that invite researchers and the public to engage with the collection’s structure, aesthetics, mediality, and encyclopedic ambitions. The interfaces have also been presented in the exhibition Fadenspiele / String Figures (Museum Tinguely), extending the project’s research into a public space.