About the project

The aim of the The Kinokroonika Exploration Project. Computational Data Enrichment and Distant Viewing of Estonian Newsreels (1922-1997) is to enrich Estonian newsreel data and make it public so that anyone can explore Estonian newsreel history. This website allows users to play around with selected visualisations, and the whole data will be available as a csv table at DataDOI for further exploration with the help of programming languages. The data of the study is based on digitised newsreel videos and their metadata from the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia and the Estonian Film Database.

The project approaches newsreels from the perspective of Cultural Data Analytics, which is a multidisciplinary approach for studying culture. While it is possible to watch the newsreels on the websites of the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia and the Estonian Film Database, this web interface allows analysing newsreels as big data and visualise different elements of the data to understand the multiple aspects of the newsreels, their temporal changes, as well as continuities. Our aim is to visualise the data in ways that allows everyone to conduct analysis of big cultural data.

Kinokroonika is part of a larger Newsreel collaboration of the European Union Horizon2020 research and innovation programme ERA Chair for Cultural Data Analytics CUDAN (Project no 810961) at Tallinn University. It is funded by the Estonian Language and Culture in the Digital Age (EKKD), a national program of the Ministry of Education and Research of the Republic of Estonia for April 2022-February 2023 (funding no EKKD77). The research group involves Mila Oiva, Helena Hanna Juht, Hadi Nowandish, Abida Bibi, Ksenia Mukhina, Vejune Zemaityte, Tillmann Ohm, Mar Canet Solà, Daniel Chávez Heras, Andres Karjus, Mikhail Tamm, Tasweer Ahmad, Mark Mets, Antonina Korepanova, and Maximilian Schich.