The CINEAGRI knowledge graph flattens archival absence and may give the impression that all periods of photochemical history are equally accessible. But this is not the case. Below is an interactive timeline that visualizes, per year, how many pages and documents are present in the CINEAGRI corpus.
Each position represents one calendar year. Empty positions mean that no source in the CINEAGRI corpus can be dated to that year. This does not mean that no historical records from that year exist: The CINEAGRI project is primarily focused on the nitrate film era (1895 – ca. 1950) and many sources were intentionally curated because they originate from or discuss this period. The corpus is therefore skewed towards such sources.
What is contained in the dataset?
Scroll horizontally or use the Tab and arrow keys to explore each year.
Snapshot generated August 26, 2026. This source count visualization was inspired by watertijdreis.nl.
The information above is approximate and serves for orientation only. Keywords, document type counts and languages are based on the database of primary archival documents only and exclude secondary scientific literature.
A comprehensive visualization of the photochemical industry is impossible because many historical documents have been lost forever: Intentionally discarded or destroyed because they were considered unimportant or inconvenient; accidentally destroyed in wars or fires, or lost in relocations. Recods survive unevenly.
Many documents from the Belgian company Gevaert, for example, were destroyed after its founder Lieven Gevaert’s death in 1935. Eastman Kodak regularly discarded historical documents in bulk. Documents from Agfa are scattered all across Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere due to the company’s multiple corporate splits and mergers, not least as a result of the German Partition. Very, very little primary source material survives at all from the companies Fujifilm and Konica.
Some periods are considerably better documented than others, and sometimes the reasons for this are completely banal: A manager or secretary may have simply been more fastidious about preserving records for posterity, or a specific box or folder was spared destruction during the World Wars, and so they happen to survive.
In any case, the document collections are patchy. They are not a coherent set of historical records that continuously covers the entire time span of early cinema. And the data displayed in the CINEAGRI knowledge graph were extracted from only a subset of those documents: another small sample of the already limited set of documents that survive.