Visualizing Vertov
Лев Манович · Russian Journal of Communication · 2013
This article presents a visualization analysis of the films The Eleventh Year (1928) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by the famous Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. It uses experimental visualization techniques that supplement familiar bar charts and line graphs often found in quantitative studies of cultural artifacts. The Vertov visualization project is a part of a larger research program to develop techniques for the exploration of massive image and video collections that the author has been directing at Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com) since 2007. In this project, I explore how the “media visualization” techniques that we have developed can help us see films in new ways, adding to the already well-developed methods and tools in film and media studies. Its other goal is to make a bridge between the field of digital humanities which recently started to embrace many newer techniques of data visualization (but not for the study of visual media) and the quantitative film studies research which until now has used graphs in a more limited way.