What can data tell us about women* in film history?
About the project
Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History (DAVIF) (2021—2025)
The research group DAVIF, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), investigates how metadata shape our understanding of film history, with a focus on women in early cinema. Through both theory and practice, we examine how data can help us to make the global contributions of female filmworkers more visible. In doing so, we also identify gaps and blind spots in cultural data collections and thus in film historiography.
The Film and Media Studies project contributes to the critical discourse on scholarly knowledge production in light of the increasing datafication of cultural heritage – that is, the creation and use of data in archival, curatorial and historiographical practices.
Data visualizations play a central role in this research process. To this end, we draw on the metadata of our project partners, the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) and DFF – Deutsches Filmmuseum & Filminsitut. The Graphics and Multimedia Programming Group at Marburg University supports us with technical expertise and practical implementation. We also work closely with media designers and software developers. This project on Lotte Reiniger is our third collaboration – following the “Women Film Pioneers Explorer” and “Explorative Datenvisualisierungen”.
For further information about the research group please visit our website: https://uni-marburg.de/Q85oo.
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What can film historians tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
Lotte Reiniger was a pioneering filmmaker whose work left a lasting mark on early cinema. She created more than sixty films, the vast majority of which have been preserved. She is best known for her hand-animated silhouette films but also contributed in many other capacities to numerous productions. Today, Reiniger remains one of the few women of the silent film era who are still widely recognized by film scholars, historians, and cinephiles. (Guerin and Mebold 2016)
Reiniger's most famous work is probably The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926. The film is celebrated as the world's first feature-length animated film and thus a milestone in film history.
What can the internet tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
Blind Spots
If Lotte Reiniger was such a pioneering filmmaker, why isn't she as famous as Charlie Chaplin?
Although – unlike in most cases – a great deal of source material on Reiniger has been preserved, her work has been relatively little researched, as is so often the case with women. This may be due to the themes the filmmaker dealt with. Fairy tales, fables, and myths are more commonly associated with children than adults and are therefore considered less relevant. (Guerin and Mebold 2016)
Reiniger's technical, aesthetic, and theoretical achievements were only marginally appreciated by her contemporaries. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, classified her work as that of an outsider. Colleagues such as Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann, and Hans Richter, with whom Reiniger worked closely, prevented (consciously or unconsciously) her from being perceived as one of their own. (ibid.)
Despite her extensive body of work and her successes during her career, which spanned from 1916 to 1981, most film enthusiasts are probably more familiar with the names Ruttmann or Richter. In addition to the focus on content, one reason for Reiniger's lack of recognition in professional circles may lie in the typical degradation of women's achievements through the feminization of craftsmanship. Ironically, it is precisely these achievements that have made Reiniger unforgettable as a pioneer of animated film. (ibid.)
Women in Film History
From the numerous books and articles on women in film history, we have learned that women have had a significant impact on film production all over the world from the very beginning of film history. Women have worked and collaborated globally, not merely in North America and Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. (Gaines 2004) Thanks to the WFPP and other feminist online platforms, we can search for all the many trailblazing women who shaped film culture. Their contributions, however, continue to be marginalized.
That is why we must not only tell different stories, but also tell them differently. This has become a major concern of feminist film historiography. (Dang 2020)
Data in Film History
In view of the increasing production and use of data in the course of digitalization, the goal of feminist film historians to increase the visibility of women’s work has taken on a new urgency. Through the production, processing, and dissemination of data, blind spots in a research field such as feminist film historiography can be maintained or amplified, but also minimized. Access to and critical reflection on data are therefore among the greatest challenges for film and media studies scholars today (Dang 2023).
Against this backdrop, this data visualization examines the role of cultural metadata in researching women in film history.
Metadata
What can the internet tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
What is metadata?
In the course of the datafied turn, the increasing datafication of cultural heritage, metadata increasingly determines whose stories can be told and which ones remain in the dark.
Put simply, metadata is data about other data, such as the name of a film director or information about the size and creation date of a digital file.
Until now, object- and person-related metadata – if at all – has been perceived primarily as a means to an end, to structure information and thus facilitate the identification, management, and retrieval of objects. The epistemological, methodological, and political significance of metadata in audiovisual media culture has only begun to be explored.
Since metadata is created and used by humans, their individual experiences and values are written into it. Through categorization of people and objects, metadata is actively involved in knowledge production processes. It contributes to ideas about the artifacts it describes. Inevitably, certain values and perspectives are emphasized while others are ignored (Bowker and Star 1999).().
Metadata not only provides information about collections or facilitates research in archival holdings. It can also serve as a source for understanding the social and political contexts in which it was created. Metadata is part of an “indexical regime,” (Fickers 2024) which has a decisive influence on our research and analysis capabilities.
What can metadata tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
In order to better understand how archival premises and practices influence film historiography and, conversely, how they are shaped by them, we have conducted a comparative analysis of metadata on Lotte Reiniger in three different databases:
- Wikidata
- DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum
- Women Film Pioneers Project
Step into the world of data analysis!
Job Titles
What can job titles tell us about women in film history?
The comparative analysis focuses on the professions under which Lotte Reiniger is listed in three different databases: Wikidata, DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, and Women Film Pioneers Project. Looking at job titles shifts the focus from the privilege often granted in film history to the individual author/director and reveals a more complex, collective conception of film production.
In addition, job titles are highly interesting because they provide information not only about a person's activities, but also about their social status, values, and the hierarchical structures of a society (Moeller 2019). Furthermore, job titles in databases can be used to observe how ambiguities and contingencies in film history manifest themselves.
Datasets
This data visualization is based on (two different datasets) from our project partners – the Women Film Pioneers Project and DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum –, which contain information about individuals and films in which they were involved. The datasets were cleaned, transformed, and enriched with (data from Wikidata) by media designer Mika Schories as part of the visualization case study (“Explorative Datenvisualisierungen”)
What can Wikidata tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
Like Wikipedia, Wikidata belongs to the Wikimedia family. With more than 100 million entries in around 300 languages covering a seemingly endless range of topics, the platform is currently the largest and most popular international database on people, objects, and events. Wikidata acts as acollaborative hub for open metadata. The data is generated by users on a voluntary basis and made publicly accessible under a CCO license.
Wikidata functions not only as a knowledge graph that links all data internally, but also as a transinstitutional network. The platform interacts with international organizations such as UNESCO, subject-specific databases such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and commercial applications such as Google Search. In addition, Wikidata is increasingly being integrated into AI applications. This is all the more important to know that even participatory platforms such as Wikidata are subject to power dynamics and marginalization (Ford and Illiadis 2023).
What can Wikidata tell us about Lotte Reiniger’s work? What job titles are attributed to her?
Let's take a look at how the distribution looks like when we compare the job titles in the films!
Let's take a closer look in the next visualization!
Conclusion
In order to understand the causes and effects of metadata, the provenance of the data, i.e., the conditions under which it was created and its use, must be investigated:
- Which individuals or organizations generated which data, under what premises, and for what purpose?
- Who is represented in databases and what remains invisible?
- What data was not collected in the first place – or was deleted?
Further questions include: What information is typically recorded in film history databases? What knowledge cannot be transferred into data structures? To what extent do technical infrastructures influence film historiography? In other words: How do digital knowledge practices affect the way in which women's work can be searched for in databases? Metadata can reveal what certain people or disciplines consider relevant. As we illustrate with the example of Lotte Reiniger, metadata in the field of film heritage reveals an astonishing heterogeneity of categorization practices that are interwoven with the local knowledge of the institutions in which they are applied.
As mentioned at the beginning, Reiniger worked in various roles on numerous film productions during her career spanning seven decades. It is interesting to note that she was not only active as an artist in the field of film, but also worked in theater and opera, and later in her life as a lecturer. These practices take on new epistemological and political implications when we consider them in relation to the collection and reuse of data in the context of data-based research. In addition to the question of what data and information can be found in cultural databases, it is also interesting to look at the differences and contradictions that are expressed therein.
Contrary to what one might assume, film history databases are by no means coherent and unambiguous, let alone standardized, and they are certainly not neutral. In our analysis, we show the extent to which databases can be understood as expressions of plural and particular perspectives on the past, as they are inscribed with archival and film historiographical ideas and practices.
References
- Brah, Avtar (1996): Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London/New York: Routledge.
- Dang, Sarah-Mai. 2025. „Managing the Past. Research Data and Film History“. In Digital Film Historiography. Concepts, Tools, Practices, hrsg. von Sarah-Mai Dang, Tim Van der Heijden und Christian Gosvig Olesen. Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics. De Gruyter, doi: 10.1515/9783111082486-007.
- Dang, Sarah-Mai (2023): “The Women Film Pioneers Explorer. What Data Visualizations Can Tell Us About Women in Film History“, in: Feminist Media Histories 9(2), 76–86, doi: 10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.76. [article]
- Dang, Sarah-Mai (2020): “Unknowable Facts and Digital Databases: Reflections on the Women Film Pioneers Project and Women in Film History“, in: Digital Humanities Quarterly 14(4) (Special Issue “Digital Humanities & Film Studies: Analyzing the Modalities of Moving Images“), December 2020, n.p., [link]. (peer reviewed) [article]
- Dang, Sarah-Mai, Pauline Junginger, and Anne Hart, eds. Data Practices, Provenance, and Categorizations in Film History. Interviews with Scholars, Archivists, and Project Managers. n.d. Accessed November 5, 2025. [link].
- Dang, Sarah-Mai; Junginger, Pauline (2024): “‚Regie‘, ‚Animation‘, ‚Bauten‘. Zur Bedeutung von heterogenen Metadaten für die Filmforschung am Beispiel von Lotte Reiniger“, in: Frauen und Film 72 (Special Issue „Archive“), 141–151. (peer reviewed) [article]
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