The Women Film Pioneers Explorer: What Data Visualizations Can Tell Us about Women 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 history can be maintained or amplified, but also minimized. Access to data as well as the critical reflection on that data is therefore one of the greatest challenges for humanistic scholars today. Against this backdrop, this article discusses how digital data visualization can enhance and transform research on women in early cinema. Presenting a case study on the Women Film Pioneers Explorer, I argue that data visualizations can help us reflect on our own (feminist) film historiographical approaches, epistemological premises, and representative conventions and thus on the “situatedness of knowledges.”