Josephine Diecke — an annotated introduction.

My research on film color grew out of the SNSF project Filmfarben. Technologien, Kulturen, Institutionen (University of Zurich, with Prof. Dr. Barbara Flückiger), which I joined for my dissertation. The project examined color film technologies across their full material, industrial, and cultural dimensions.

My own focus has been on the East German processes Agfacolor and Orwocolor — their discursive construction as quality standards within the global competition of color film manufacturers from the 1930s to the end of the GDR. This work culminated in the monograph Farbfilm aus Wolfen: Agfa, ORWO und das Versprechen von Qualität (1936–1990), published in 2025 with oa books (open access and print-on-demand).

A second strand of my work applies and reflects on computational and digital methods in film studies — from large-scale corpus analysis and sentiment analysis of historical film reviews, to practical frameworks for teaching digital methods to film scholars.

This includes work on how digital tools transform historiographical practice: what new questions become askable, what new problems arise, and how methods travel between disciplines. I convene the DHd working group Film und Video and was co-editor of the Open Media Studies Blog at Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (2021–2024).

A digital-historiographical inquiry into women's filmmaking in the GDR, with a focus on the last generation of East German filmmakers active between 1989 and 1992. Current work centres on Chetna Vora, reconstructing the conditions of production and reception around a body of work at the edges of official film history.

The project draws on archival material from the Filmmuseum Potsdam and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, and applies computational methods for corpus analysis and visualisation. It is accompanied by the lecture series Mythos Gleichberechtigung at the University of Zurich.

The Audiovisual Research Infrastructure — a UZH × UB Zürich collaboration developing shared infrastructure and practices for audiovisual research data and collections. The project builds bridges between film-studies research workflows and library-side data curation, with a focus on long-term access and metadata standards for audiovisual materials.

Swiss Film Subtitling: Historical, Archival and Computational Perspectives — an SNSF research project examining subtitling variants and version-sensitive metadata in Swiss cinema. The project asks how different language versions of the same film travel across distribution contexts and what traces they leave in institutional records.

Developed in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Alexander Künzli and Dr. Sevita Caseres (University of Geneva), combining archival research with computational analysis of subtitle corpora.

A human-centred video annotation tool for film analysis, currently being relaunched in collaboration with TIB Hannover and the Movie Analytics group at UZH. VIAN allows frame-precise annotation, segment classification, and colour analysis across entire films — and the very tool whose interface this page borrows from.

How is Artificial Intelligence Changing Science? Research in the Era of Learning Algorithms — a Volkswagen Foundation project examining the epistemic and methodological transformations that machine learning is bringing to academic disciplines. Project partner since 2024, contributing a film-studies and digital humanities perspective.

The Multimodal Audiovisual Analysis (MAVA) Cluster — an SDSC-funded initiative hosted at the Language and Information Research Institute (LIRI), University of Zurich. The cluster develops shared infrastructure and methods for large-scale computational analysis of multimodal and audiovisual data.

The Digital Audiovisual Analysis Lab — a DSI Lab Infrastructure project at the University of Zurich's Digital Society Initiative. DAVALab builds tools and workflows for the computational analysis of audiovisual materials across research domains, connecting film studies, media science, and data science.

Language Data and Documentation — a CLARIN-CH project developing infrastructure and best practices for the long-term preservation and reuse of language data in Switzerland. LaDaD addresses the specific challenges of audiovisual language data, connecting archive, linguistics, and film-studies perspectives.

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

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), and Weibliches Filmschaffen in der DDR (HS 2024).

Each year I lead student excursions to film festivals and archives. Most recently: Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna (FS 2025) — a week-long immersion in film-historical programming, restoration debates, and encounters with curators, archivists, and scholars from across the world.

Conversations with filmmakers and editors, held in shared spaces between archive, university, and cinema. Guests have included Luc Schaedler (HS 2025) and Jörg Foth (HS 2019). These sessions give students direct access to working practitioners and to the craft decisions behind specific films.

In October 2025, I introduced a screening of Evelyn Schmidt's Das Fahrrad (DDR 1982) at Kino Xenix, Zurich — contextualising the film within East German women's cinema and the conditions of its production and rediscovery.

In March 2025, I curated Kino ohne Barrieren? Untertitel und Gebärdensprache im Film as part of the UB Biblioweekend — a public programme examining accessible cinema formats, captioning practices, and the politics of film subtitling for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences.

The work that doesn't always make it onto a CV: conversations in corridors and cinemas, small introductions, translations, the slow maintenance of shared spaces between archive, university, and screen. Some of the best thinking happens there.