The Origins of CineMAP

CineMAP project began at Penn State University in 2013 when Professor Jennifer Boittin launched her course FR137: Paris — Anatomy of a City through aDigital Humanities Initiative. The course sought to understand Paris through film and film through Paris. Students selected key scenes, determined via various research tools where these scenes were shot, and then plotted them onto a digital map. Students not only researched films but also learned to think about cinematic spaces in relation to real spaces. The resulting website, Paris—Anatomy of a City allows users to process film and the city in new ways. 

In Spring 2015, Professors Jonathan E. Abel, Jennifer Boittin, and Samuel Frederick won Penn State’s College of Arts and Science’s Teaching Innovation Project (TIP) to support expanding the idea into CineMAP for Japanese, French, and German film. They began to realize CineMAP’s full potential and to set the groundwork for future development. Expanding the geographic scope of the project in the Spring and Fall of 2015, collecting over 800 lines of data on various films.  In Summer 2016, Abel, Boittin, and Frederick were awarded the Center for Humanities and Information’s (CHI) grant for digital projects to support further and higher quality data collection and analysis. We supervised a team of six graduate students who focused on data collection for Japanese, French, and German films from 1914 to 1945 in order to acquire a usable sample set from a limited period of film history. This data collection enabled the database to grow to over 40,000 lines of location data and will form the basis of an upcoming collaborative proof of concept article focusing on monuments, transportation infrastructure (waterways, railways, etc.), and mountains. In 2018, Abel revamped his Japanese Film and New Media class to include significant projects that drew on CineMAP as a resource. Students used EsriStoryMaps to create arguments about represented and real spaces depicted in and captured on Japanese film. In 2020, Abel worked with database specialists to enhance the database. It was converted the to a SQL format. More data was included expanding the number of films included by tenfold. In addition, synopses in four languages (English, French, German, and Japanese) were added.

In 2023, Steve Ridgley (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Abel prepared CineMAP Japan for a beta rollout in conjunction with UCLA’s JPP (Japan Past & Present) project supported by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. 

The Future of CineMAP

CineMAP JAPAN 2025 will become a dynamic hub for logging and visualizing the relationship of film and space. Over the coming years we hope to open the database for submission and access for wiki participation from around the world. 

First, CineMAP Japan Beta will in 2024 be opened to experimentation and critique to scholars in film studies, urban studies, and tourism studies who participate in our symposium at University of Wisconsin, Madison in May of 2024. Second, in the summer of 2024, short essays documenting those encounters with the data and visualizations will be posted to JPP remarking on both the limitations and uses of the tool. Third, in 2025, we will open a portal for symposium participants to submit data and visualize film locations for their institutions.