The purpose of the project, filmarkivforskning.se, has been to make available film and media historically relevant research materials online, such as film history books and writings, old movie magazines, price lists [priskuranter], film and cinema programs (so-called pole posters), censorship cards and film music programs. Free, has been the beacon for making all material available-basically akin to a CC-0 license-and, in addition, the material has been digitised in high resolution so that even fine details are readable and possible to discern. The project has also utilised a conservation perspective to allow access to brittle material that only in exceptional cases are loaned. The project has (via the National Library of Sweden) used the service "eBooks on Demand" (EOD), a European partnership in which all books and magazines that are no longer protected by copyright can be ordered as an e-book (or digital file). Among the writings of the Swedish film pioneers, such as Frans Hallgren, Marie Louise Gagner and Gustaf Berg, the project has made available some 2,000 pages of text. In terms of price lists [priskuranter] more than 1,000 pages have been digitised, and of film, cinema and music programs, corresponding figure are about 3,000 pages. Furthermore, up to 1,500 pages of the oldest Swedish film magazines have been made digitised, including Stjernan, Biografen and Nordisk Filmtidning-all of which are central film publications for silent film research. In collaboration with the National Archives some 27,000 censorship cards (about 47,000 digitised front and back sides) from the Statens biografbyrå (film censors) between 1911 to 1921, have also been digitised and listed with meticulous metadata, through the help of retired film historian FD Per Olov Qvist (all cards are currently being made available on the site).

The site filmarkivforskning.se has been appreciated by film scholars-but also by other users. The number of unique visitors (according to Google Analytics) have remained at around 5,000 unique users, with some 15,000 page views. Film scholars (probably) account for most of these, but other films historically interested people have also contacted us with questions, including Mattias Mattsson (owner of the cinema Capitol in Gothenburg) who greatly appreciated the making available older film programs online. In order to link the published material with current academic film research, the project initiated partnerships with several Swedish film scholars who prepared and wrote thematic and interactive presentations on the site. Both longer and shorter thematic overviews of various film historical questions have been presented, such as: PhD Ingrid Stigsdotter's "'To be initiated into all Bio's mysteries-nixum!' Women, silent film culture and history", or PhD student Erik Persson's, "Municipal advertising and information film in Gothenburg 1938-1964". Project members have also published a number of thematic introductions, such as: "When the War came to Sweden: First World War 1914-1918 on the Screen" (Rohdin), and "In the media archive. On the establishment of ALB" (Snickars). A further central research exchange has involved a partnership with another RJ-film project on film commercials (lead by Professor Patrick Vonderau at Stockholm University). The major result of this cooperation (between these two RJ-projects) was an international conference organised at the National Library of Sweden in October 2015: "Moving Image Analytics: Research Infrastructures for Film Heritage", at which some fifteen international researchers from both Europe and the United States participated.

The work with the site filmarkivforskning.se has obviously been featured on a variety of national and international conferences. A larger, joint project presentation was, for example, made at the international film archives conference, "Turning the Page. Digitalisation, movie magazines and historical audience studies" at Ghent University in November 2015. Snickars has lectured and talked about the project, at for example, the conferences, "Concept of News" at the Danish Film Institute, and at, "Emerging Screenshot Sites/Sights-Cinema Culture around the Baltic Sea 1895-1920" at Tallinn University Baltic Film and Media School. Above all, however Natzén has presented and lectured vividly about the project-including at the University of Pittsburgh, the British Academy, University of Tromso and De Montfort University, Leicester, where he in May 2016, for example, spoke on the subject: "What Is Worth Saving? Archival Principles and Female Musicians Cinema in Sweden During the Silent Film Era". In addition, Natzén and Rohdin participated at the conference "ACSIS-In The Flow: People, Media, Materialities" in Norrköping in June 2015, where they presented a paper entitled: "A Changed Archival Agenda for Cultural Heritage".

The project's most important contribution to film research, as well as the most significant infrastructure within the project that members have worked with, is, however, the making available (and modification) of 8,000 already scanned cinema programs (from the period 1904 to 1920). Within the previous so called, Access initiative, these film programs were once scanned. Taken together, this material is an internationally unique film and advertising historical collection that testify to both the national film cultures development, as well as indicating what was actually screened at Swedish cinemas. Within the project, the material has been OCR-encoded and made searchable on the site-again with the assistance of film historian Qvist. The film programs can be found both through free text and cartographic search. All film titles on the actual programs have also manually been listed in a database, in all approximately 49,000 titles. Since the project has scanned and indexed all censorship cards between 1911 to 1920, at the time of writing these two databases are being interlinked. The work with the site filmarkivforskning.se will namely continue, and be integrated into the National Library of Sweden's permanent organisation. The site will be transferred into a WordPress Environment and given a new institutional residence. To enable continued site development, digitisation of material as well as research, internal grants (taken from the regular filmarkivet.se budget) will be made available. A first task will be to interlink the database of the film programs with the database around censorship cards-as well as with the Swedish Film Institute's database of their current films. The work will result in a far more comprehensive mapping of early Swedish films.

Finally, a few words should be said about the actual research (and new research questions) generated among members within the project. For Snickars, the work has mainly generated new methodological insights and ideas, in areas such as the distant reading of censorship cards and film programs (given his interest within the research field of the digital humanities), and with a connection to another of Snickars' research project at Humlab, Umeå University, on old newspapers: "Digital papers-on the press interface 1800" (Torsten Söderberg foundation 2014-16). Natzén, in his ongoing research-where the project has resulted in a number of articles, and in a soon completed book manuscript-has also been mainly interested in the film programs. Natzén has primarily explored the film programming figures central role in the formation of a Swedish cinema music culture during the early 1900s. The focus has been on how programming was used for the establishment of a new medium like film. Rohdin in turn, has primarily devoted himself to and researched older Swedish advertising film-from 1910 onwards-a period within silent film history that has previously been overlooked. At the time of writing, Rohdin is completing a book manuscript, "The Emergence of Advertising Film in Sweden", which addresses previously unexplored genres like film commercials and sports films during the interwar years from the perspective of Americanisation, modernity, celebrity culture and the expansion of the Swedish welfare state.

Publications

Bokmanuskript / Book Manuscripts:

Christopher Natzén, ”Biografmusik 1900-1919: Ambulerande och fasta biografers musikliv” – kommande 2017/18.

Mats Rohdin, ”Reklamfilmens framväxt i Sverige” (Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2017/18) – kommande.

Pelle Snickars, ”Cultural Histories of Old and New Media” (Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2017/18) – forthcoming.


Artiklar / Articles:

Christopher Natzén, "Music Programming and the Formation of Swedish Cinema Culture", Performing New Media: 1890-1915, red Kaveh Askari et al (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2014).

Christopher Natzén, ”The Formation of a Swedish Cinema Music Practice 1905-1915, The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice, red Claus Tieber & Anna K. Windisch (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).

Christopher Natzén,"Female Cinema Musicians in Sweden 1905-1905", Making the Invisible Visibile in a Digital Age: New Approaches to Reclaiming Women's Agency in Film History, red Ingrid Stigsdotter (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2017) – forhcoming.

Christopher Natzén, "Film Translation in Sweden During the Early 1930s", Splendid Innovations: The Translation of Films 1900-1944, red Carol O’Sullivan & Jean-Francois Cornu (London: British Academy, 2017) – forthcoming.

Mats Rohdin, ”När kriget kom till Sverige: Första världskriget 1914–1918 på bioduken", Biblis nr. 68, 2014/2015.

Mats Rohdin, ”När reklamfilmen klev ut ur biografen i början på 1900-talet", Biblis nr 79, 2017 – kommande.

Pelle Snickars, ”Remarks on a failed film archival project”, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema vol. 5, no. 1, 2015.

Pelle Snickars, ”Oscar II och medierna – kring Stockholmsutställningen 1897”, Kungliga världsutställningar, red. Anders Houltz (Stockholm: Centrum för Närinsglivshistoria, 2017) – kommande.

Pelle Snickars & Fredrik Norén, ”Distant Reading the History of Swedish Film Politics—in 4,500 Governmental SOU Reports”, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 2017 – forhcoming.