Wednesday’s panel on “Network Studies” (B19) situated the digital as itself an object of study, and offered a number of valuable insights into historical and contemporary digital practices. Steven Malčić offered a particularly valuable history of the early Internet, carefully contextualized in object-oriented ontology as well as the history of computer science as a discipline. According to Malčić, ARPANET engineers conceptualized network “entities” in an inverted way, positing the stability of “processes” (protocols and applications) and the ephemerality of “objects” (users, hosts, and servers). Sheila Murphy, in her presentation on fitness trackers and other wearable devices, showed some of the ways in which personal data collection on them has been framed as a game. She made an important distinction between two different models of data collection: that of all-powerful, active “surveillance,” and the more passive “capture model” of wearables. Malčić and Murphy’s papers were only two of the many that explored the important intersections between the digital-as-technology and the digital-as discourse/rhetoric/philosophy, demonstrating that our understanding of how digital technology is implemented is fundamentally linked to the ways in which it is conceptualized.

Thursday offered a pair of workshops on digital archives and their uses, and both testified to the ways that digital technologies are changing research, publishing, and pedagogy. The workshop on “Making the Past Visible” (F19) modeled a number of innovative practices. Michael Newman made a compelling case for the use of archival images as evidence instead of simple “illustration.” He showed how platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr might be used as a supplement to the traditional book publishing model, not only as a means of preserving color, sharing evidence productively, and making visual arguments, but also as a way to connect scholars and other users with common interests. Deborah Jaramillo made the interesting point that pedagogy should be considered an integral part of archival research; teaching students with documents can be a way to curate the often-intimidating volume of digital archival documents. Curation was a theme that returned throughout the workshop, with several participants arguing for a greater valuation in our field—particularly for the purposes of hiring and promotion—of data collection, processing, and sharing.

A pedagogically-focused workshop later in the day (G18) showcased several resources for and approaches to teaching film and broadcast history. Beth Corzo-Durchardt stressed the growing importance of teaching students how to evaluate online sources, as well as how to be collaborative in their primary document research. Catherine Clepper modeled a fascinating assignment using the Cinema Treasures website (cinematreasures.org) to engage students with the exhibition history of their own hometowns, while Eric Hoyt, citing Franco Moretti, argued that the humanities needs to do a better job of teaching students how to read data at scale. Toward that end, Hoyt gave first public demonstration of Arclight, an app that visualizes hits, by year, for search terms across the entire corpus of the Media History Digital Library.

In keeping with Hoyt’s hands-on demonstration of the turn toward digital archives, Martin Johnson made the crucial point that despite this turn, scholars often proceed as if they are still using physical collections. This echoed nicely with the valuation point made in the earlier workshop, hammering home the importance of crediting—and being critical of—digital collections.

Finally, Friday afternoon’s panel on Digital Film Historiography (L8) showcased a large-scale digital project underway at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. Christian Gosvig Olesen presented on the project, which uses the 900 early films, 2000 photos, and 120,000 business documents of the almost completely digitized Jean Desmet collection. As Olesen explained, the Desmet project combines a mapping of early film distribution in the Netherlands (based on the business documents) with ImagePlot visualizations of the collection’s color films, in an exploration of the ways in which New Cinema History and statistical style analysis might be combined. Work toward combining these two very different modes of analysis for the project’s ultimate question—Did films with certain patterns of color aesthetics correlate with particular distribution patterns?—remains in an experimental stage. However, the project’s mapping component offers an interesting model for laying bare the inherent uncertainty and often-invisible lacunae of digitized corpora. By using color, the Desmet project clearly distinguishes between all the films in the collection and those for which distribution data actually exists, modeling one solution to the problem of corpus transparency in digital scholarship.

My personal takeaway from Montreal is that scholars are increasingly using digital tools for every aspect of their work, be it analysis, archival research, publication, or pedagogy—and with a healthy critical understanding of their advantages and pitfalls. Truly exciting work is being done in all of those arenas. What remains, as I see it, is the problem of technical implementation. Aside from a breakout session in the pedagogy workshop, none of the panels I attended offered practical training in the use of software tools or coding. Even a broad discussion of the kinds of tools, platforms, or languages that might be useful for approaching particular problems or research questions would help to expand the base of scholars able to do digital work. Some kind of forum focusing on the use of specific digital tools would almost certainly be well-attended if it were to be offered at next year’s conference, whether as a workshop, practicum, or even a poster-style “drop-in” exhibition. Such a forum would be invaluable, even if it were only a starting point; getting hands-on has a wonderful way of reducing the intimidating character of some more advanced digital tools, for students and advanced scholars alike. If the last few years have seen a digital turn in media studies, then solving the problem of technical implementation may very well usher in a digital acceleration.