Methodology
At first, my research was centered around creating a comprehensive timeline of the theater's history but it became apparent that the eight weeks afforded to me for this task would be too short to present any sort of in-depth or meaningful analysis of this history.
What I uncovered while going through archives on the Campus Theatre, however, was that Oscar Stiefel, the manager of the time, played a significant role in the war effort through initiatives held by the theater. While many theaters admitted troops to films for free, it is clear that the Campus Theatre is an outlier in the time and effort it put in to raise funds and boost morale on the home front. This largely forgotten history is told not only through events and meetings it hosted but also through the theater's programming schedule.
In order to learn more about the exhibition history of the Campus Theatre, I began by cataloging the films featured in the programming schedule of the first five years of the art deco theater's history. This process involved scanning through digitized issues of The Lewisburg Journal and The Bucknellian published between 1941 and 1946 and recording the advertisements promoting weekly screenings and events being held at the Campus Theatre during this period.
The screening data was compiled in a spreadsheet with the following categories:
- Title
- Director
- Male Lead*
- Female Lead
- Genre**
- Screening Date
- Release Date
- Production Company
- Distribution Company
- Days Screened
**The genre categorizations were largely arbitrary and were created using data made available through IMDb.
Though seeing these films listed sequentially based on chronological order it became easier to identify trends that occurred within the data set.
This data was then visualized in Tableau.