On the Origins, the Community, and the Database of the Women Film Pioneers Project. Interview with Kate Saccone

In this interview, Kate Saccone, project manager of the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) since 2013, reflects on the origins, the community, and the database of the WFPP. She highlights the role of the WFPP as a digital platform for research and publication. The interview discusses the handling of gaps, ambiguities, and absences in the data, accessibility, licensing, and long-term preservation of digital content, particularly with regard to Creative Commons licenses and technical infrastructure. Saccone addresses the WFPP as a social networking space for feminist film historians and outlines future developments for the project. The interview is part of an interview series on data practices, provenance, and categorizations in film history initiated by the research group „Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History“ (DAVIF) (2021–2025), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The goal of the research group is to explore data visualizations in order to tell different stories differently. The WFPP is one of the film historiographical project partners, in addition to the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), both of whom have provided their research data for data visualizations. The interview series: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17233942 The project website: https://uni-marburg.de/Q85oo