Dear Nitratevillians:
I just completed an online filmography for my book Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture. It’s not a conventional filmography in the sense of providing cast and credit information on individual titles. Rather it’s a statistical overview of short-subject production at the major studios and some independents between 1926 and 1939.
You can access it here:
https://hokumcomedy.blog
There’s a light degree of interactivity, in the sense that you can highlight or hide some of the variables that are displayed in each of the graphs.
The data itself was drawn primarily from the trade press of the time and then cross-referenced against some of the excellent filmographies already in print (e.g., Edwin M. Bradley on the 1926-1931 period, Roy Liebman on Vitaphone, Richard Roberts on Hal Roach, Brent Walker on Sennett, Okuda and Watz on Columbia, among others).
Obviously there’s oodles more information that I could include, and I might build out the site to incorporate more forms of data in the future. But for now, statistical totals seemed a pretty straightforward way to visualize some of the major trends during this period.
I hope you find it interesting.