Mapping the movies: the Australian cinemas map

Abstract

As part of our current ARC project ‘Mapping the Movies’, Dr. Mike Walsh and I are developing a geodatabase of Australian cinemas, covering the period from 1948 to 1971 and based on a consistent dataset found in the trade journal Film Weekly, providing basic information on the ownership, location, and capacity of approximately 4,000 venues. A principal purpose of the database is to provide an opportunity for crowdsourcing information about the venues from other material available on the web and from the interested public. We expect to engage the interest of organisations devoted to the history and preservation of cinemas and of school teachers developing local history projects under the national curriculum. The information gathered will include details of screening programs, photographs, and digitised newspaper reports. Funded by an eResearchSA Summer Scholarship, we are developing a set of templates for collection of crowdsourcing data and extend the website to manage and use the additional information. A broader aim of the project is to develop a generic open source geodatabase for use by Digital Humanities researchers who want to map relatively small scale datasets. The system is focused around a database structure that supports the definition of objects with metadata, allowing additional objects to be added to the system without the need to significantly change the underlying database structure. The system is focused on easy implementation and management, needing high-level IT skills for only brief periods in the establishment of a project, to define objects in the database and in the programming code, and customise the user interface to meet their specific needs. The paper will describe the evolution of the research project and demonstrate the website.