Josephine Diecke — an annotated introduction.

Farbfilm aus Wolfen: Agfa, ORWO und das Versprechen von Qualität (1936–1990) — published in 2025 with oa books, in open access and print-on-demand.

The book traces the discursive construction of the East German colour film processes Agfacolor and Orwocolor in the global field of competition — from the late 1930s through the founding of the Filmfabrik Wolfen and on to the end of the GDR. A media archaeology of industrial colour.

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.

A collaborative research project with Prof. Dr. Alexander Künzli and Dr. Sevita Caseres (University of Geneva), examining subtitling variants and version-sensitive metadata in Swiss cinema. The project asks: how do different language versions of the same film travel across distribution contexts, and what traces do those versions leave in institutional records?

I convene the DHd working group Film und Video and serve on the NECS Steering Committee. From 2021 to 2024, I was co-editor of the Open Media Studies Blog at Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, working with Kai Matuszkiewicz on open-access publishing practices in media studies.

A human-centred video annotation tool for film analysis, currently being relaunched in collaboration with TIB Hannover and the Movie Analytics group at UZH. At v.1.1.1 — and the very tool whose interface this page borrows from. VIAN allows frame-precise annotation, segment classification, and colour analysis across entire films.

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.

Digital Cinema-Hub — a Volkswagen Foundation project hosted at Philipps-Universität Marburg. I worked as coordinator and research associate, building bridges between film studies and digital methods: organising workshops, editing the Open Media Studies Blog, and co-authoring teaching resources for computational film history.

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. I joined as project partner in 2024, contributing a film-studies and digital humanities perspective.

Scholar-led Open Access Publishing in Media Studies — a non-profit association supporting community-owned publishing infrastructure in the field. Co-founder and board member. SOAP works to ensure that media studies scholarship remains controlled by its scholarly communities rather than commercial publishers.

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.