AniVision
New Technology-Assisted Approach to Studying Animation History
Keywords:
Animation, Computer Vision, Ephemeral Film, Useful Cinema, Utility Film, Machine LearningAbstract
The digital humanities project AniVision uses machine learning and computer vision to explore a large corpus of animation in ephemeral films produced in Austria, East Germany, and West Germany during the Cold War. Ephemeral films are a diverse group of films produced for specific utilitarian purposes. While there is animation in these films, it has been comparably neglected in animation studies. In recent decades, technological advances have created opportunities to improve this situation. In AniVision, a machine learning-based approach is developed to automatically classify animated material within a large corpus of ephemeral films. A collaboration between animation scholars and computer scientists, the project aims to study a previously understudied corpus and to develop methods suitable for the analysis of other similarly structured corpora. This paper provides an overview of ephemeral film and its relationship to animation, before introducing the AniVision project and presenting some of its results.
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