Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond

电影记忆和数字档案是关于扩大我们的知识和理解观众如何联系和记住观影体验。“going to the pictures”是怎么被记住的？这些记忆中的经历该如何表达呢？在演讲吗?在写作吗?通过一系列创造性的实践？这些表达能告诉我们，我们对电影的记忆如何影响我们的日常生活？参与21世纪数字通信和研究的发展，该项目将扩大学术界和公众对这些电影体验元素的认识。该项目将制作一个免费的网站，由一系列与英国观影有关的历史资料组成。网站上有哪些具体的资料？这个项目的出发点是在“20世纪30年代英国电影文化”（CCINTB）的过程中收集的材料，这是一个大规模的调查，在20世纪90年代进行的，针对20世纪30年代的电影观众和电影。CCINTB收藏在兰开斯特大学图书馆的特别收藏中，包括：a)对生活在英国大陆四个地区的20世纪30年代电影爱好者进行的250多个小时的深度访谈；b)来自英国各地的20世纪30年代电影爱好者完成的约200份调查问卷；c)从受访者和问卷受访者那里收到的200多封信件、散文和书面回忆录；d) 150多件20世纪30年代的电影纪念品和手工艺品(日记、明信片、剪贴簿、电影节目、海报、杂志)，大多由线人捐赠。这一宝贵的资源目前隐藏在公众视野之外。一个专门的网站的建立和整个馆藏的数字化将意味着所有的CCINTB资料都将以数字形式提供给公众和学术研究人员。自CCINTB收藏以来，对历史电影接受的研究有了很大的扩展，现在已经成为电影研究的一个重要分支。这也是一个引起公众极大兴趣的话题。现在时机已经成熟，可以利用和开发人文和社会科学学者可以使用的数字工具，将这些关于20世纪30年代观影和电影记忆的材料与最近的调查进行对话。除了实物管理和数字更新、存档和编目外，还将进行新的研究方案和面向公众的活动。这些活动将包括一个受CCINTB收藏启发的新戏剧制作，以及一系列以阅读和录音线人采访摘录为特色的电影放映活动。该项目的研究阶段旨在介绍有关电影体验和电影记忆的实质性新发现，同时通过国际研讨会、会议和出版物与研究界分享这些见解。公众参与活动安排在整个项目期间，以便项目的许多发现可以与公众分享。一套以档案为基础的活动计划，包括创意艺术家的驻留计划，将在项目初期展开，目的不仅是宣传项目，而且着眼于参观者的作品可能会以意想不到的方式，为项目的研究设计和/或网络界面的构建提供素材。

CINEMA MEMORY AND THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE is about expanding our knowledge and understanding of how audiences relate to and remember the experience of cinemagoing. How is 'going to the pictures' remembered? How may these remembered experiences be expressed? In speech? In writing? Through a range of creative practices? What can such expressions tell us about how our memories of films figure in our daily lives? Engaging in 21st-century developments in digital communication and research, this project will expand academic and public knowledge of these elements of the cinema experience.The project will produce a freely available website composed of a range of historical materials related to cinemagoing in Britain. What specific materials will be available on the website? The project's starting point is the materials gathered in the course of 'Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain' (CCINTB), a large-scale inquiry, conducted in the 1990s, into cinema audiences and filmgoing in the 1930s. Deposited in Special Collections at Lancaster University Library, the CCINTB collection includes:a) Over 250 hours of in-depth interviews with 1930s cinemagoers living in four areas of mainland Britainb) Some 200 questionnaires completed by 1930s cinemagoers from across the UKc) Over 200 letters, essays and written memoirs received from interviewees and questionnaire respondentsd) Over 150 items of cinemagoing memorabilia and artefacts from the 1930s (diaries, postcard collections, scrapbooks, cinema programmes, posters, magazines), mostly donated by informants.This valuable resource is currently hidden from public view. The production of a dedicated website and the digitisation of the entire collection will mean that all of the CCINTB materials will be made available in digital form to members of the general public as well as academic researchers.In the period since the CCINTB collection was assembled, research on historical film reception has expanded considerably, and is now an important subfield within film studies. It is also a topic that attracts considerable public interest. The time is ripe to bring this material on 1930s cinemagoing and cinema memory into conversation with more recent inquiries, by drawing on and developing digital tools now available to scholars in the humanities and social sciences.Alongside the physical management and digital updating, archiving and cataloguing of the collection, programmes of new research and public-facing activities will be conducted. These will include a new theatre production inspired by the CCINTB collection and a range of film screening events featuring readings and recordings of extracts from informants' interviews.The project's research phase will aim to introduce substantial new findings on the cinema experience and cinema memory, while also sharing these insights with the research community via international workshops, conferences, and publications. Public engagement events are scheduled throughout the duration of the project so that many of the project's findings can be shared with the general public. A programme of archive-based activities, including residencies for creative artists, will be launched early on in the project, with a view not only to publicising it but also with an eye to the possibility that visitors' work may feed, in perhaps unanticipated ways, into the project's research design and/or the construction of its web interface.