# CINEAGRI > Global Elements of Cinema ## Posts - [New paper: 'Media Archaeology Meets Digital Humanities: Global Trajectories, Methodological Frictions, and Contact Zones after the Computational Turn'](https://cineagri.net/paper-media-archaeology-meets-digital-humanities/): A new peer-reviewed editorial has been published in the journal TMG Journal for Media History. This editorial to the special issue ‘Media Archaeology 2.0: Rethinking Media Histories with the Digital Humanities’ starts with the observation that digital humanities has become more archaeological, while media archaeology has become more digital. It offers a comprehensive account of both fields, reconstructing the development of media archaeology as a field, method, and pedagogy, including a selective overview of international developments beyond its canonical German- and Anglophone centres, and situating its encounter with the computational and reflexive turns in the digital humanities. We show how both […] - [New paper: 'Cinema's Atmospheric A Priori: How Weather and Environment Shaped Celluloid Film Manufacturing and Raw Material Supply at Fujifilm, Daicel and Agfa'](https://cineagri.net/paper-cinemas-atmospheric-a-priori/): A new peer-reviewed paper has been published in the journal Iluminace, in a themed issue on filmic matter and geographic specificity, edited by Byron Davies and Jiří Anger. Where was the cotton for Fujifilm’s cine-film grown? Who supplied the animal parts that would end up coated on Agfa’s film as gelatin? How did climate, environment, geology, and river hydrology shape the history of celluloid film manufacturing, and thus of cinema? This article enlists several archival collections and a range of little-known, multi-language secondary sources in the broader task of understanding cinema’s relationship with the material environment and climate, and its historical role […] - [Event announcement: Media/environment - Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis](https://cineagri.net/event-media-environment-screens-and-streams-in-the-age-of-climate-crisis/): As part of the project, an international synposium is being organized on 26 and 27 August, 2026, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. What are the planetary burdens of media technology? What cultural and aesthetic frameworks shape how nature is depicted on screen? The international symposium media/environment: Screens and Streams in the Age of Climate Crisis confronts the question of how media both represent and materially transform the natural environment in a warming world. Prominent speakers from three continents will present the latest research on topics ranging from the materiality of film and the finitude of resources to images of extraction, film archives, the colonial and environmental history of […] - [New general publication: 'RAG for Historians: A Radically New Way of Interacting with Multilingual Collections?'](https://cineagri.net/article-rag-for-historians/): A new article has been published on LinkedIn. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a radically new way of interacting with historical documents. It essentially allows researchers to talk to entire collections, ask questions and get answers grounded in your own data – across languages – without perfect keywords, irrespective of the language of the original records. For work with highly multilingual archives, this is a game-changer – but not without issues. In this article, I summarize my experiences developing and working with a RAG system for historical research. I document the process of tailoring the RAG app AnythingLLM to the rigors of […] - [New book chapter: '"Please reseed": Camphor, Turpentine, and the Agrogeographies of Celluloid Cinema'](https://cineagri.net/paper-camphor-turpentine-and-the-agrogeographies-of-celluloid/): A new peer-reviewed book chapter has been published in Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis, edited by Mary Hegedus and essica Mulvogue. Utilizing a range of Japanese and English-language historical sources as well as recent scholarship on the trade and cultivation of camphor and turpentine, this article explores some of the vegetal materialities on which celluloid film – and thus also early cinema – depended. Camphor is a plasticizer for cellulose nitrate; turpentine is the raw material for making synthetic camphor. I argue that understanding camphor and pine trees as both industrial commodities and as […] - [New general publication: 'Vibe-Coding for Historians: How I Digitized 21.000 Archival Documents Without Coding Skills'](https://cineagri.net/article-vibe-coding-for-historians/): A new article has been published on LinkedIn. Over the past four months, I have been developing a custom document digitization app to process the 21.000 photos of historical letters, contracts and technical reports that I’ve collected while working on CINEAGRI. The app had to be able to: The catch? I don’t know how to code. The app is now fully functional and works spectacularly well. Learn how I did it with the help of an AI chatbot. ## Pages - [CINEAGRI atlas & knowledge graph](https://cineagri.net/atlas/): The CINEAGRI atlas – a visual, interactive knowledge graph built on top of the CINEAGRI dataset – is currently in private beta preview. An initial public release is expected in November 2026. Release of the underlying dataset is expected at the end of 2026. Selected domain experts have password-protected access via data.cineagri.net. - [Methodology & ethics](https://cineagri.net/methodology-and-ethics/): How are data compiled throughout the CINEAGRI project? The CINEAGRI dataset has been compiled from thousands of documents using multiple interlocking technologies, most of which make use of some form of large language model (LLM). Several layers of guardrails ensure a minimum level of reliability. LLMs have been chosen on the basis of performance audits and custom bechmarks comparing several available alternatives. Learn about the data extraction methodology below, scroll down to learn about biases and gaps in the dataset and how the project mitigates them, or see this interactive visualization of the number of sources in the dataset. The project’s […] - [Archival absences](https://cineagri.net/archival-absences/): 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 […] - [Publications](https://cineagri.net/publications/) - [Acknowledgments](https://cineagri.net/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 […] - [Contact](https://cineagri.net/contact/): Reach out We welcome your questions and comments about CINEAGRI. Contact person Dr. Marek Jancovic Email m.jancovic@vu.nl Address Vrije Universiteit AmsterdamFaculty of Social Sciences and HumanitiesDept. of Art & Culture, History, and AntiquityDe Boelelaan 11051081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Social Media - [Latests posts](https://cineagri.net/blog/) - [Home](https://cineagri.net/): The initiative Why this matters Companies like Fujifilm, Agfa or Eastman Kodak are still globally famous, household names even in the digital age. These companies made their fortunes making film and photographic products, and became giants of the chemical industry. Yet the familiar histories of these businesses tell us surprisingly little about where their materials came from, who produced them, and how their manufacture has transformed environments and communities around the world. Film stock depended on an extensive network of farms, forests, slaughterhouses, mines, chemical plants, ports and trading companies. Raw materials moved through supply chains that crossed national and imperial […] ## Optional - [Agent (MCP protocol)](websites-agents.hostinger.com/cineagri.net/mcp) [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)