From Shots to Narratives: Expanding Multimodal Approaches to Filmic Storytelling in the Digital Humanities

Abstract In recent years, digital humanities (DH) research has evolved from its textual origins to encompass film and video studies as critical areas of inquiry as well. Nevertheless, much of this research has remained tied to the formal levels of description most readily revealed by automatic processing. This maintains a gap between treatments in terms of formal technical features and the concerns of many researchers involved in film analysis of a more qualitative, interpretative nature, thereby reiterating the classic tension within DH as such: that is, how to relate levels of description that are “computable” and those more responsive to broader humanities-oriented interests. In this article, we set out an approach to this challenge that incorporates a multi-layered analytic framework capable of specifying increasingly abstract descriptions in terms of patterns at lower levels. This enables us to start bringing concerns of narrative organization and interpretation into analysis at scale. We set out the overall approach and show several examples of its use.