Acknowledgments

CINEAGRI is indebted to a large number of project partners, colleagues, archivists and librarians who have generously shared their expertise.

The research was made possible by the Dutch Research Council, NWO. While the project is formally financed by the institution with an acronym, it takes a great many real humans to keep Dutch science fair and operational even in a hostile and fickle political climate. This includes employees of the NWO as such, but also the many scientists who volunteer their time to work on selection committees and as reviewers, both domestically and internationally, including those who have reviewed the CINEAGRI grant proposal. Thank you.

CINEAGRI’s principal investigator wishes to thank the following colleagues, friends and partners:

  • Ginette Verstraete, Katja Kwastek, Judith Keilbach, Pepijn Brandon, Sebastian Scholz, Ivo Blom, Klaas de Zwaan, Linda Kopitz, Aodhán Kelly, Marilena Mela, Younes Saramifar, Kristine Steenbergh, Alan Cienki, Babs Boter, Sam Heijnen – all colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for their tireless guidance and analytical counsel. Marco Last, for his superb feedback and astonishing ability and willingness to articulate the gist of the project long before I even understood what it was.
  • Ryo Okubo, who has supported the initiative over many years in all aspects, from theoretical to logistical, and without whose support I truly would not have been able to realize it.
  • Iris Burgers, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou and Emily Clark for the support and unmissable project therapy sessions.
  • Members of the Sustainable Media and Animal Studies workgroups within NECS, including but certainly not limited to Alexandra Schneider, Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna and María-Vélez Serna.
  • Alec Badenoch and the Entangled Media Histories Network, Frank Kessler, Li-An Ko, Rik Smit and members of the Mono-Media Research Network for the opportunity to share early, immature visions of the project and receive such rich feedback on them. Within and outside of the Mono-Media Research Network, I thank Takuya Umeda, Kazuto Kondo, Manabu Ueda, Yoshitaka Ota, Takahito Niikura, Yusuke Shindo, Yutaka Iida, Daisuke Nagata, Kentaro Nagai and Naoyuki Ohara for their hospitality, the keen and layered comments that have made this project a much more meaningful undertaking, and for making me feel so effortlessly welcome in a new academic environment.
  • Elena Past, Emmet von Stackelberg, Alice Lovejoy, Pansy Duncan, Yuriko Furuhata, Sebastian Figueroa, Kappy Mintie, Alice Plutino, and Frauke Pirk for their expert feedback, insights and leads throughout the years.
  • Giovanna Fossati, Anne Gant, Catherine Cormon (EYE Film Museum) and Carolyn Birdsall and Floris Paalman (University of Amsterdam) for the various forms of generous input and for thinking along with me throughout the project’s stages.
  • Fumiko Tsuneishi, for the countless inspiring conversations and the kind of brilliant, incisive questions that continue burning and that have revealed aspects of the project to me that I had never considered before, as well as Hidenori Okada and Noriaki Miyamoto, all from the National Film Archive of Japan.
  • Norikazu Oya, for the truly fascinating conversations on the one hand, and also for so kindly sharing his knowledge and discoveries.
  • Mika Shimbo, Dean of the Faculty of Sociology & Social Work and Roland Domenig at Meiji Gakuin University.
  • Chun-yen Chen, Wu Chi-Yu and Jamie Chih-Yun Yao for help with resources and information related to Taiwan.
  • Yoshihiro Matsuo, Ai Horiuchi, Kanta Shibata, Masato Kubo, Hiroshi Sensui and Keisuke Sakagami from IMAGICA for a once-in-a-lifetime look behind the scenes and into the plumbing of a globally singular film lab.
  • Kazuhiko Matsuo (Yokohama Celluloid House), Jun Arakawa (Fujifilm) and Katsuhiko Sumita (Daicel) for advice on resources related to the Japanese celluloid industry, and Mr. Nagasaki from the Kawakami-mura Cultural Center for navigating me to the site of Fujifilm’s former gelatin factory.
  • The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, especially Finn Arne Jørgensen, Dolly Jørgensen, Anne Hemkendreis, Yaron Jorgen Balslev, Eike Christian Heine and Louis James Henry, for the inspiring conversations, the space and time to think, and access to a fantastic library. My month in Stavanger was worth a year’s work for the project.
  • Victor de Boer, Sarah Shoilee, Lorella Viola, Dries Daams, Julia Noordegraaf and Ivan Kisjes, for their foundational advice on all aspects of the project related to digital humanities and for answering an endless barrage of questions about data ontology, platforms and tools.
  • Subho Sur de Kruijf for advice on data visualization and UI.
  • Ulbe Bosma, for advice related to commodity history and commodity frontiers.
  • Matthew Tyler Combs and, once more, Emmet von Stackelberg for sharing their doctoral dissertations with me.
  • Everyone at the unforgettable GAVA 2026 3rd Global Audiovisual Archiving conference in Salaya, where the first working prototype of the knowledge graph was presented. Joshua Ng in particular, for the lively brainstorm about LLMs.
  • Dulce van Vliet, Arlinde Vrooman, Andreas Weber, Harro Maat and Vincent Baptist for much-needed critical input during the final stages of the project.
  • Jan-Maarten Pauw and Elias Major, for help with digitizing towering piles of documents.
  • Employees of the German Federal Archives, the National Diet Library of Japan, the Sankō Library, the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum Library, the Nihon University College of Art Library, the Meiji Gakuin University Library and the Kobe Municipal Library for help with finding, navigating and copying various resources.
Stacks of old documents and papers piled on dusty shelves, creating an organized yet chaotic scene.
View of a historic industrial brick building in Shrewsbury, England, under clear skies.
Detailed view of cotton boll plants ready for harvest in a field.
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