News and Events

HKBU launches South and South-East Asia Documentary Film Research Website

HKBU Library recently held an event to launch the South and South-East Asia Documentary Film Research Website which contains over 2,000 digitised pages of official documents relating to the use of official films in South-East Asia and Hong Kong written between 1945 and 1970.

This database is one of the outcomes of a government-funded research project on the use of official films in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya over this period, carried out by Professor Ian Aitken of the Academy of Film of the School of Communication. Other outputs to date include international conferences held at HKBU in 2009, 2012 and 2013, the research monograph Hong Kong Documentary Film (Aitken and Ingham, Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the forthcoming research monograph The British Official Film in South-East Asia (Aitken, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

As a result of the digitisation process, these primary materials can be cross-referenced in a number of ways. Related to the wider developing field of “digital humanities”, the website which is now available online marks a major achievement for the furtherance of research as scholars around the world will be able to access the materials.

At the launching event, Professor Aitken talked about the publications, the documents already digitised and a whole new set of materials which includes an additional 2,500 pages that will be analysed and digitised over the coming 12 months.

Dr Camille Deprez, Research Assistant Professor of Academy of Film of the School of Communication, will participate in the website’s second phase of development. She spoke about the materials relating to her on-going government-funded research project on documentary film in India between 1948 and 1975, which will be uploaded onto the research website after analysis and the digitisation process.

Ms Rebekah Wong, Senior Assistant Librarian and Head of the Digital and Multimedia Services Section, gave a demonstration of the website, which is the third Digital Humanities project of the University Library. For details of this project, please visit http://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/documentary-film/ .

	Professor Ian Aitken (left) and Dr Camille Deprez (right) speak about the project