Alisa Lebow  0:00  
My name is Alisa Lebow, and I am the creator of this project filming revolution. It's a project that I did over the course of several years starting in 2011. I finished it, at least the first iteration, in 2015. And then I expanded it a bit more for the publication by Stanford University Press and their Stanford digital digital humanities publications in 2018. So this is the Stanford page. And it's one way to enter the project.

Alisa Lebow  0:48  
If you were to type in the URL, filming revolution.supdigital.org, actually would take you directly to the splash page of the project. And this is what viewers would see at the beginning of a project of the project, before they've actually entered into it. But in order to enter, you would click start browsing. 

Alisa Lebow  1:14  
This brings you to what we were calling the global archive. This is kind of the full panoply of possibilities. In graphic form of interview extracts, people, the people that I went and interviewed, themes that they've discussed in their interviews, and also projects that they would be involved in. So I think many people just come to this project to the global archive page, and just start routing routing around. And you know, you can see if you hover over any of these nodes or dots, you get a kind of constellation that shows up and you know, you can just click randomly and enter into any of these nodes or what we call clusters. That's one way to do it, just, you know, find your way in a way in the dark in this overwhelming archive that has hundreds of nodes. But you may notice that there are three main colors. This is a color color coded archive, and the colors have a reason. They are associated with the three main organizing aspects of the project: themes that were discussed, by the various people I interviewed people who were interviewed or there there are 30 interviews in this project all color coded in sort of yellow. The yellow dots are people like Layla Sammy, Marianne Khoury, these are people that I interviewed and the projects that any of these people would be associated with or projects that are discussed in the in this in Filming Revolution are color coded by red. Okay, so if you if you hover over a red dot you'll see the people associated with that project in this case, "Land Without" is a short video made by Yasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk so they are connected by constellation, by by dots, by lines. Little Eagles for example, you want to know who made "Little Eagles?" Mohamed Rashad. Now was there anyone else involved in it? Well, actually, they're off the page if I slide up yes, Bassam Mortada is in the film, "Little Eagles," so he's associated here with it. So those are the main color codings of this project. There's, you'll notice here, a list. This list has everything has everything on it that is in the archive and can be filtered, right. So if I want to organize this file, I want to just experience this project by going to the people and getting to hear their interviews, I can just click on that filter. And all of the people interviewed are listed here. And again, the global archive is then filtered just by the yellow dots. Okay. So I could then go to one of the people being interviewed and say, I'll go to Salma, Salma El Tarzi. Click on Salma. And then we get to see a picture of Salma from her interview. These are the extracts from her interview that are included in Filming Revolution. These are the themes that her interview extracts may have touched upon, will have touched upon, and if you see a red dot, that would be a project that she was involved in. Okay. So if I wanted to I could go really methodically from person to person and listen to all of the extracts or watch all the extracts from their interview. Starting with how she introduced herself, I could click on this horizontal rectangle, "intro" and it'll take me directly to:

Salma Em Tarzi  5:06  
My name is Salma El Tarzi and I'm a filmmaker. I make documentaries. I have made documentaries so far and a couple of short fiction. And I worked for a long time as a TV commercial producer to make money and recently I started painting again.

Alisa Lebow  5:36  
So that's Salma El Tarzi's intro. You can continue watching this way by the recommended recommended extracts. You can go back to Salma El Tarzi, I can actually use the level tool here and kick, click back on the last cluster I visited, which was Tarzi. You'll see if I watch something, it will be dimmed. I can watch it again, of course, but that indicates where I've already been. And I can do I can do this right the way through the list. I could instead say hmm she's talking about women's projects, maybe I'd like to see what she says. Click on that it'll take you to the cluster around women's projects and Salma El Tarzi is talking about it as is, let's say Marianne Khoury, a well known film producer in Egypt, okay. So that's one way I can I can filter the project, or I can actually search the project by theme. There are over 70 themes that people touched upon. And themes are, you know, when I edited the interviews, and as I was editing them, I would tag different themes that came up. And when multiple people talked about the same theme, they then kind of joined into a cluster, let's say, around certain topics. So let's say using film as a weapon, I can click on that theme, and anybody who discussed something related to this theme comes into a kind of you, we could say curated dialogue. Now they weren't speaking to one another--the interviews were separate--but they're brought into dialogue, they don't all necessarily agree with one another, they may be be talking about different aspects of a theme. But you can actually explore this theme, let's say using film as a weapon. By coming into this cluster, or node. If you want to know more about what was discussed in a kind of organized fashion, there are also articles, every theme, and every person actually, in this interview, in this project has an article associated with them. So I can go to the film as weapon article. And I can read about all the different people who talked about this theme and kind of, you know, get an overview of that theme. As I was writing, I would mention, you know, let's say Jasmina, I'll quote from her interview "as Jasmina Metwaly puts it," etc, etc. And if you want to go to that extract that's being quoted from you can go right there by clicking on this. So we wanted actually every aspect of this project to be interactive, even the written components so that you can go to the extract and you can go back to this article, or you can go back to the theme, just use the x over here and you can go back to the theme, there are there is a tutorial. If you find it complicated to to navigate the the project, you can actually go to the tutorial, click on it, and it'll tell you where you are what you do here. In this cluster, you'll find relevant material from interviews and projects about this theme, you can click on the red yellow rectangles to watch related interview extracts click on the red rectangle rectangles to watch related videos from from projects that are being discussed. Okay, so, and this tells you that the  vertical, I get this confused, the vertical rectangles lead you to the articles. Another way to get to articles in this project and the articles can be very useful in giving you an overview about somebody's full interview, what they did, what they said, or about a theme. We also have a list of the articles here that can also be filtered by theme or by person. So hopefully those articles are one way you know, let's say somebody is more text based than more graphic based. Those articles should help you also as a way to navigate the project. If you were if you found if you were in a theme and you were having trouble finding it again and you remember what it was called, you can also use the search function here at the bottom of this list, you can search and let's say you want to get back to Hala Lotfy  you could search Hala Lotfy or if you wanted to get back to filming anything with filming on it, the themes appear again here "filming in Tahrir Square," you can get to an article there. So you can use this search function. And you should clear the search function. Also remember to clear the search function.

Alisa Lebow  10:36  
If you want to get back to the full list, okay. You can hide that list if it's getting in your way. And if you prefer to search things graphically, just click on the archive again and it'll come back to you. You may notice on the upper left, there's an option to show pathways. People who have been to the site--students, many times students will create pathways so that they can bring it to the class and say I looked at this for somebody Arab Spring class presentation, they made a pathway. And we can watch people's pathways, we can click on that pathway, and it'll take us to the media that they gathered. This pathway happens only to have one video. Usually pathways have more than one video. But you can add things and you can create a pathway to for your own experience of the website. And then you can share that that's one of the most interactive aspects. That's something that viewers can actually bring to, to this project. And there were as you can see, many, many, many pathways made. So that would be another way one could navigate this website by looking at where other people went and what they found. So you can be as organized and kind of programmatic about how you want to explore filming revolution. Or you can be as random. You can just go to the global archive like this and kind of just click on Hala Lotfy or click on Bassam Mortada, or click on a project change theme and learn more about an aspect very randomly, Oh, I know who Youssef Chahine is, what you know, what does he have to do with filming revolution. And I could click on that and see more related to that, or I could be very programmatic, go to the list. And say, I'm going to look at all the projects that were mentioned and discussed in this in this in Filming Revolution, learn about them, based on you know, what I see here, maybe look at the trailer, if that's included, as an option. And obviously, this project is made by Tahani Rached, oh Tahani Rached, I think I've heard her name. She's a well known Egyptian documentary filmmaker. And then I could go through Tahani's interview, or I could go to the article about Tahani and learn more about it that way. So this is a resource that is made for researchers, but it's also made for anyone interested in what happened during the Egyptian revolution and what kind of filmmaking was being done. 

Alisa Lebow  13:26  
You can learn more about this project, there's a list at the bottom, that will lead you to information about the project, to the credits, assuming you might be interested in in, you know who made this project. Actually I want to give a shout out to the programmer who program did all the original programming for this, that's Huseyin Kuscu, who I work very closely with. There are resources, some of which are probably already out of date. The bibliography that informed this project, a way to contact the maker--me. And as I'm, as I mentioned, the tutorial, you can always sort of pop up the tutorial at any point and get yourself oriented again. 

Alisa Lebow  14:13  
So that's basically my project, as I understand it anyway, and as a viewer would have experienced it. And hopefully, it makes sense. I'm going to leave you just with a piece of media. Mostafa Bahagat he he's one of the few people who gave his interview in in Arabic. And he was a very front line, video journalist who talked a lot about kind of what it meant to try and capture the the events as they were happening from the perspective of a video journalist. 

Mostafa Bahagat  15:14  
[video playing in Arabic with English subtitles]

Alisa Lebow  15:34  
And take you back, using the level to a cluster of Mostafa Bahagat and back to the global archive.

Alisa Lebow  16:16  
Thank you for watching.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai