Kinolab: A Digital Humanities Project for the Analysis of Film Language

This article describes Kinolab, a platform for the digital analysis of narrative film language. While the work of literary scholars has benefitted from the application of computational methodologies to text analysis for decades, researchers who work with moving images have faced technological and legal obstacles that hinder their ability to analyze large corpora of film and other media. Recent modifications to U.S. copyright law and technological advances in the annotation of moving images have created new opportunities to harness Digital Humanities methodologies for film and media research. Kinolab, which originated as a digital clip archive for Italian films and series set in Rome, has taken advantage of these advances to expand its collection beyond Italian film and media with the goal of building a platform for the analysis of film language that is broadly representative of diverse historical periods, cultures, and genres, thereby enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of how formal elements of narrative media relate over time and across geographical boundaries.