Collaborative Research and Documentation of European Film History: The COLLATE Collaboratory

When scientists publish articles in journals like NATURE they describe specific results of their work gained from numerous experiments and detailed scientific research. They have recognized rules that can be used for describing nature, for example, various aspects of our physical and biological world. By contrast, scientific work within the humanities means ‘Arbeit am Begriff ’ (formation of concepts and terms) and – more generally – the analysis and interpretation of concepts and ideas. For simplicity, we ignore here the so-called applied sciences. It is generally acknowledged in academic contexts, promoted by the Philosophy of Science, that work and research in the humanities is organized in the form of a discourse that is open-ended in nature – it will never be finished. There is no final interpretation of Franz Kafka’s stories; there is no final definition of ‘alienation’, and we find a continuously changing society which makes it impossible to fix these terms and concepts. Collaborative Research and Documentation of European Film History: