The discursive formation of knowledge has been a central concern of feminism since its inception. In the field of film history, the question of how to reconstruct the past while taking into account the contingent and transformative nature of history is an essential question. The increasing digitalization alters our understanding of film history and the way we do film history. New technologies transform the objects of research as well as scholarly media practices. In order to explore these transformations in the context of teaching, the Women Film Pioneers Explorer (WFPE) was created.



The WFPE is the result of an application-oriented seminar in computer science that was conducted from winter 2020 to summer 2021. The project was co-led by Dr. Sarah-Mai Dang, Principal Investigator of the BMBF Research Group Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History (DAVIF) at the Institute of Media Studies, and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Thormählen, Head of the Graphics and Multimedia Programming Group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Philipps-Universität Marburg.



The WFPE allows users to explore the invaluable research of the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) initiated by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta and launched as online-only resource at Columbia University in 2013. Always expanding, the WFPP publishes original scholarship on women who worked behind scences during the silent film era. The WFPE offers additional perspectives on the rich collection with the means of interactive data visualizations. Different tools and techniques were applied by the students to present the data in a geographical, chronological, and hierarchical manner. Besides exploring new ways of displaying research, the website seeks to encourage active participation in the WFPP by emphasizing the many blind spots in film history. Ideally, the WFPE will stimulate further initiatives to make creative use of existing research data in the field of women and film history.

Please note that the visualizations on this website are based on a project-specific data query (see suggested citation); the underlying data are not updated. Like any other database, the WFPP can only hold a fragmentary collection and therefore represents a particular view of film history. The visualizations are not representative of all women in early cinema, but are a snapshot of film historiographical work. In this respect, they serve as a corpus analysis of the WFPP.
For a critical analysis of the situatedness of the Women Film Pioneers Explorer see Sarah-Mai Dang. “The Women Film Pioneers Explorer: What Data Visualizations Can Tell Us about Women in Film History.” Feminist Media Histories 9, no. 2 (April 1, 2023): 76–86. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.76.