The primary purpose of CineMap is to provide users with a way to visualize trends in film exhibition within the continental United States over the roughly 100-year history of feature-length motion pictures. CineMap will allow users to view information about individual theaters’ ownership and years of operation. Eventually, as the database on which the site is built becomes more fully populated, CineMap will incorporate additional information such as seating capacity, number of screens, architect and architectural style, etc. Most importantly, CineMap will eventually be indexed to individual films so that a user would be able to literally map the screens on which a given film played at any point in the last 100 years.
This project will represent a powerful and much-needed research tool that will be particularly useful to film scholars, digital humanists, cultural historians, cultural geographers and software developers. The potential applications are numerous, but we offer two examples here in an effort to demonstrate some of the possibilities: (1) a scholar researching the cycle of ‘race movies’ produced in the 1920s and 1930s would be able to visualize where and when African American movie-goers had the opportunity to actually see these films; (2) an economist or historian interested in examining the role of film exhibition within broader demographic and/or economic trends would conceivably be able to overlay data from other sources such as the U.S. Census onto data from CineMap in order to see more clearly any correlation between the number of movie screens within a community and factors relating to the population’s racial diversity, socioeconomic status, age, education, etc.
We envision CineMap as a tool to facilitate and enrich the scholarly understanding of film exhibition history; however, we expect that it will also be of interest to organizations that are invested in the history of motion pictures such as the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, home to the world’s largest archive of extant early cinema, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which has, since implementing the Academy Film Scholars program in 2000, worked to develop closer ties to the field’s professional organization, the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, and to encourage scholarly projects that expand the historical record of theatrical motion pictures.
Although our project consists of building an interactive website (i.e., a citable data repository), it is worth noting that CineMap is very much in line with broader currents in both text-based film studies scholarship and digital humanities projects. Over the last 10-15 years, the sub-field of exhibition studies has become an increasingly central aspect to the discipline of film studies. The rich and diverse body of exhibition scholarship produced over the last decade demonstrates that the cultural, social and economic dimensions of cinema cannot be fully understood so long as the field focused its energies on motion picture production and distribution while neglecting exhibition.
One of the practical challenges most exhibition projects must overcome in one way or another is that archival resources for the study of film theaters are considerably fewer and less accessible than those that exist for the study of specific films. CineMap speaks to this need (as well as to others, of course), by providing an open research tool to which scholars, institutions and organizations will eventually be able to contribute. In this, it reflects the widely accepted belief within the digital humanities and new media studies that the most valuable digital research projects are open, participatory and enriched by the collective intelligence of its users. Additionally, it recognizes and aspires to contribute to the critical turn effected by exhibition studies and digital humanities, one that has begun to move fields such as film studies, art history, literary studies and the like away from the focus on ‘representative texts’ that has held sway within much of the humanities for decades.
In terms of existing digital resources that are similar to CineMap, there are, at present, neither proprietary nor open-source tools that focus on or provide access to information about the historical geography of film exhibition. The most widely used website pertaining to film history is undoubtedly the Internet Movie Database (http://us.imbd.com). IMDb provides film scholars and casual moviegoers alike with instant access to an invaluable wealth of information about specific motion pictures. However, it provides no information pertaining to a film’s actual exhibition beyond their initial release date and box-office earnings. Meanwhile, Cinema Treasures (http://www.cinematreasures.org) is a crowd-source site that allows individual users to contribute information about specific film theaters, and is an extremely valuable resource for anyone looking to learn more about individual exhibition sites. It is powered by a flat database, though, and thus affords users extremely limited opportunities to interact with or query their records. The site did add Google Maps API functionality several years ago so that visitors to the site could view the location of a given theater, but given the limitations of the API, all theater records appear on the same map regardless of whether or not they still exist. The result is an exhibition geography that has been completely decoupled from exhibition history. A third site worth mentioning is Going to the Show: Mapping Moviegoing in North Carolina (http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/index.html). Going to the Show is a digital humanities project that documents the history and geography of movie-going in North Carolina between 1896-1933, and is a project we expect to learn much from as we begin the build for CineMap.