Josephine Diecke — an annotated introduction.

My research sits at the intersection of film studies, media studies, and digital humanities. I work on audiovisual heritage and preservation, film historiography, media archaeology, color film technologies, and digital methods for the computer-assisted analysis of multimodal and audiovisual data.

My monograph Farbfilm aus Wolfen: Agfa, ORWO und das Versprechen von Qualität (1936–1990) was published in 2025 with oa books, in open access and print-on-demand. It traces the discursive construction of the East German colour film processes Agfacolor and Orwocolor in the global field of competition between the 1930s and the end of the GDR.

A second strand of my current work follows women's filmmaking in the GDR — most recently as part of a digital-historiographical inquiry into the work of Chetna Vora and the last generation of East German filmmakers (1989–1992).

A third strand, developed with Prof. Dr. Alexander Künzli and Dr. Sevita Caseres from the University of Geneva, looks at subtitling variants and version-sensitive metadata in Swiss cinema.

I convene the DHd working group Film und Video, am a member of the NECS Steering Committee, and was co-editor of the Open Media Studies Blog at Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (2021–2024).

Extended cut — selected publications

• Farbfilm aus Wolfen: Agfa, ORWO und das Versprechen von Qualität (1936–1990). oa books, 2025.
• «Revisiting Weimar Film Reviewers' Sentiments: Integrating Lexicon-Based Sentiment Analysis with Large Language Models» (with Isadora Campregher Paiva). Journal of Cultural Analytics, 9 (4), 2024.
• «Managing Tools and Expectations: Dos and Don'ts of Teaching Digital Methods for Film Analysis and Film Historiography» (with Malte Hagener). In: Dang, van der Heijden & Olesen (eds.), Doing Digital Film History. De Gruyter, 2024.
• «Raw Film Manufacturing Between Economic Efficiency and Environmental Awareness in East Germany». In: Scholz & Ivanova (eds.), Science Discourses in Cold War European Research Institutions, Cinemas and Media. Berghahn, 2024.
• «Keeping your Enemies Closer. Strategies of Knowledge Transfer at the East German Filmfabrik Wolfen». In: Street & Yumibe (eds.), Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury. Rutgers University Press, 2024.
• «Navigating new horizons: Openness, blogs, and media studies» (first author, with Kai Matuszkiewicz). NECSUS, 14 (1), 2024.
• «On #Materiality» (with Bregt Lameris and Laura Niebling). NECSUS, 11 (2), 2022 — special issue editor.
• «Lea aus dem Süden. Ethical and Practical Considerations for Digital Color Transfer» (first author, with Trumpy, Weiss & Flückiger). Journal of Film Preservation, 103, 2020.

→ Full record on ORCID

I teach at the Seminar für Filmwissenschaft, University of Zurich, across BA, MA, and doctoral levels. My pedagogy combines theoretical and conceptual engagement with practical, hands-on work — on digital tools and on primary source material. I draw on the principles of Forschendes Lernen: students are invited into the doing itself.

Through process and reflection, the aim is for them to develop a feel for how research questions, sources, theoretical frameworks, and methodological choices fit together — and to use that feel as a springboard for critical synthesis, interpretation, and writing that yields new insights, for themselves and for others.

Recent and upcoming courses include Digitale Filmgeschichte: Quellen, Methoden, Perspektiven (FS 2026, with Sarah-Mai Dang), Filmkultur im Zeitalter digitaler Plattformen und Ökosysteme (HS 2026), Digitale Filmanalyse zu Gender und Diversität im Schweizer Kino (HS 2025), Weibliches Filmschaffen in der DDR (HS 2024), and An den Rändern der Filmgeschichte 2 (FS 2025). I also lead student excursions — most recently to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna (FS 2025) — and convene Werkstattgespräche with filmmakers, including with Luc Schaedler (HS 2025) and Jörg Foth (HS 2019).

→ UZH profile

Beyond individual publications, my work takes shape in longer-running collaborative projects that connect film studies, archives, and digital infrastructure.

VIAN — a human-centred video annotation tool, currently being relaunched in collaboration with TIB Hannover and the Movie Analytics group at UZH. Currently at v.1.1.1 — the very tool whose interface this page borrows from.

AViRI — the Audiovisual Research Infrastructure, a UZH × UB Zürich collaboration developing shared infrastructure and practices for audiovisual research data and collections. Member since 2024.

DiCi-Hub — Digital Cinema-Hub, a Volkswagen Foundation project (Philipps-Universität Marburg, 2021–2023) where I worked as coordinator and research associate, building bridges between film studies and digital methods.

HiAICS — How is Artificial Intelligence Changing Science? Research in the Era of Learning Algorithms. Volkswagen Foundation project; project partner since 2024.

SOAP e.V. — Scholar-led Open Access Publishing in Media Studies. Co-founder and board member of this non-profit association supporting community-owned publishing infrastructure in the field.

→ Get in touch

The work that doesn't always make it onto a CV: cinema introductions, conversations with filmmakers, workshops on barrier-free film, and the occasional public talk. In October 2025, I introduced a screening of Evelyn Schmidt's Das Fahrrad (DDR 1982) at Kino Xenix; in March 2025, I curated Kino ohne Barrieren? Untertitel und Gebärdensprache im Film as part of the UB Biblioweekend; and across the years, I have organised Werkstattgespräche with filmmakers and editors — most of them held in shared spaces between archive, university, and cinema.