Deb Verhoeven
Biographic Data
| ID | 136367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deb Verhoeven |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deb |
| FAMILY NAME | Verhoeven |
| SIGNATURE | VERHOEVEN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3680-3561 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Through a glass darkly: Researching workplace discrimination using an identity meta-perception (IMP) lens
This paper presents findings based on a novel approach to researching identity and inequality in the workplace. Our research results from a large survey of camera department employees in the Australian screen industry. Workers were invited to self-nominate various personal identifications, but also to tell us how they thought they were perceived by others. With this information we analysed workplace discrimination in terms of the various possible…
Gender (im)balance in the Russian cinema: On the screen and behind the camera
The relationship between on-screen and off-screen inequality in film industries and the relative impact of these on movie attendance is widely discussed but not necessarily empirically demonstrated. This article examines the binary gender composition of film project teams and the gendered representation of film characters as factors for cinema attendance. We collected a unique dataset (N=1285) of all films released during the pre-pandemic decade …
Shadow of a doubt: A Network Analysis of Mentoring as a Screen Industry Equity Intervention
Purpose Policies intended to encourage gender equity in the film industry are ramifying and take many forms. This paper uses social network analysis to assess the effectiveness of one popular equity policy, shadowing, a form of mentoring. In shadowing programs, women and gender minorities (WGM) are connected to more experienced members of the industry through attachment to their productions. Design/methodology/approach We constructed real collabo…
She Must Be Seeing Things! Gender disparity in camera department networks
Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities
Universities and management consultants are locked in a danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. We are academics with long experience of the consequences of change management and the employment of consultants in universities. Deb is sufficiently "long in the tooth" that her enti…
The circus we deserve? A front row look at the organization of the annual academic conference for the Digital Humanities
Academic conferences are considered central to the dissemination of research and play a key role in the prestige systems of academia. And yet the organization of these, and the power systems they maintain, have been little discussed. What is a conference supposed to achieve? Who and what is it for? The annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO)’s Digital Humanities conference is a central occasion in the digital humanities academic…
Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world
For this special section on “geographies of the digital,” we explore how DNA‐based data storage is touted as an alternative to traditional storage modalities and pitched by the data storage industry as a more efficient, stable, and long‐term archival solution than that offered by current technologies. In analyzing how DNA is soaked in the language of sustainability, life, and longevity by those trumpeting the new technology, we situate emergent d…
Film, Video, DVD and Online Delivery
This chapter describes a well-worn but now largely by-passed film distribution itinerary, from large public screens to smaller domestic ones through a series of consecutive release ‘windows’. The emergence of small-scale private funding platforms such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and the Australian-based Pozible has been a major development for independent and low-budget filmmakers who do meet the minimum budget threshold for the producer offset. Th…
Controlling for openness in the male-dominated collaborative networks of the global film industry
Studies of gender inequality in film industries have noted the persistence of male domination in creative roles (usually defined as director, producer, writer) and the slow pace of reform. Typical policy remedies are premised on aggregate counts of women as a proportion of overall industry participation. Network science offers an alternative way of identifying and proposing change mechanisms, as it puts emphasis on relationships instead of indivi…
How Do We Live Together Without Killing Each Other?” Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives on Relationality
“How Do We Live Together Without Killing Each Other?” Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives on Relationality
Re-Distributing Gender in the Global Film Industry: Beyond #MeToo and #MeThree
This article draws on a big cultural dataset of over 130 million global screen times to consider the impact that the gender of a film's director has on the screening prevalence and geographic spread of new release feature films at the cinema. We compare results based on film screenings between December 2012 and May 2015 across a set of forty countries including the United States, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, and Brazil. This research…
Understanding the dynamics between the United States and Australian film markets: Testing the ‘10% rule’
Australia has historically been an important market for American media exports. As far as film trade relations between the two countries go, there is an anecdotal perception that distributors follow a ‘10% rule’ to predict the popularity of Hollywood titles in Australia, expecting American films to earn around one-tenth of their domestic box office receipts when screened downunder. Nonetheless, as prevalent as this ‘rule’ has been in the industry…
A ‘natural experiment’ in Australian cultural policy: Australian Government funding cuts disproportionately affect companies that produce more new work and have larger audiences
In Australia, cultural policy settings differentiate between purported ‘small-to-medium’ and ‘major’ performing arts organisations, primarily in relation to their revenue size and institutional stability. This article publishes a quantitative analysis of the relative creative outputs of these Australian performing arts organisations, focusing primarily on the production of so-called ‘new works’: original cultural texts, created and performed rece…
The Cinema Cities Index: Comparing Urban Cinema Cultures Around the World
Cinema culture varies markedly around the globe and between cities. While this is obvious, the drivers of cinema culture are complex and interact in different ways across different locations and often give rise to a distinct character of localised cinema. This can be witnessed at different scales: across countries, between cities and, on a more granular level, based on localised neighbourhoods. In this article, we apply quantitative methods to in…
As Luck Would Have It
This essay explores the ways in which new developments in digital research infrastructure change our expectations of archival research and offer opportunities for a newly energized feminist approach to the archive. A specific platform, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure, is explored as an example of how digital technologies enable the coproduction of the archive and at the same time extend the possibilities for serendipitous discovery.
Agregación de los datos para vincular social en las humanidades y artes creativas: La "Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI)" = Aggregating data for social linking in the humanities and creative …
This paper reports on the development of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI), a service which aggregates data from thirty Australian data sources and makes them available for use by researchers across the humanities and creative arts, and more widely by the general public. We discuss the methods used by HuNI to aggregate data, as well as the conceptual framework which has shaped the design of HuNI’s Data Model around six core entity ty…
Australian films at large: Expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance
International markets have in recent years become a critical component of the business model for Hollywood cinema, opening up a renewed interest in the global dimensions of film diffusion. Smaller film-producing nations such as Denmark have similarly emphasised global distribution as a key component of the industry's success. Typically, however, claims for Australian film industry success rely almost exclusively on a film's domestic box office pe…
Petal Diagrams: A New Technique for Mapping Historical Change in the Film Industry
As the study of cinema has increasingly turned to the examination of economic ebbs and industrial flows, rather than focussing its attention solely on the critical evaluation of the films themselves, new analytic techniques and tools have been adopted (and adapted) by film scholars. Key amongst these is the use of innovative visualization techniques that can assist in the understanding of the spatial and temporal features of film industry practic…
‘It was an experience that totally blew up in my face’: Steve Railsback and Turkey Shoot
The schlock horror film Turkey Shoot is widely regarded as one of the most disreputable Australian exploitation titles in a genre already well noted for controversy. This short article frames the controversies that surround the film from production to critical reception, which sets the scene for an interview by Mark Harley with the film's star Steve Railsback, who reflects on the movie's production, his role, the controversy and the film's recept…
Coming Soon (to a Theatre near You): The Temporality of Global Film Distribution to Australia
This article explores the changing contexts of international film exhibition in Australia over a 20-year period (1989-2009) by examining in some empirical detail Australia's position in the global flow of films during this time. It argues that, at the most abstract level, distributors are engaged in the management and mediation of time and space in the field of global communications. It is proposed that distributors, through the organisation of t…
Above the Bottom Line: Understanding Australian Screen Content Producers
The recently completed Australian Screen Producer Survey provides the most current and detailed picture of the culture, motivations and aspirations of a highly influential sector of the content production industries. Drawing upon the results of the survey, this article reflects on the historical and theoretical difficulties entailed in defining the producer as a professional category, before outlining some of the survey's key findings. In particu…
Australian screen adaptations in the AFI Research Collection
(2009). Australian screen adaptations in the AFI Research Collection. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 325-343
She would say that, he's from Melbourne: Fun and games with Dame Edna and Barry Humphries
This article explores the role that urban place and specifically urban comparison play in the public performances of both the comedian Barry Humphries and the character Edna Everage. In developing Claire Colebrook's analysis of satire as a form of humour that is physically and historically located, we argue that the initial success of Humphries’ satire rests on his elaboration of a specific series of geo-social locations. The article then examine…
Twice born: Dionysos Films and the establishment of a Greek film circuit in Australia
From the late 1940s until the late 1970s Melbourne was home to a dynamic Greek cinema circuit made up of some 30 different inner-city and suburban venues operated by a handful of vertically integrated exhibition/distribution businesses. Dionysos Films was amongst the first Greek film exhibition/distribution companies to form in Australia and from 1949 until 1956 it operated with little significant competition, establishing the parameters for a di…
Sheep and the Australian Cinema
The book focuses on two key 'sheep films': The Squatter's Daughter (Hall, 1933) and Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950). Both movies are concerned with the national project, in which sheep growing and nation building are seamlessly aligned. But Verhoeven artfully demonstrates that it is precisely in their emphasis on textual re-iteration and repetition that the sheep films critique an otherwise ostensibly 'national' vision
A ‘natural experiment’ in Australian cultural policy: Australian Government funding cuts disproportionately affect companies that produce more new work and have larger audiences
In Australia, cultural policy settings differentiate between purported ‘small-to-medium’ and ‘major’ performing arts organisations, primarily in relation to their revenue size and institutional stability. This article publishes a quantitative analysis of the relative creative outputs of these Australian performing arts organisations, focusing primarily on the production of so-called ‘new works’: original cultural texts, created and performed rece…
Above the Bottom Line: Understanding Australian Screen Content Producers
The recently completed Australian Screen Producer Survey provides the most current and detailed picture of the culture, motivations and aspirations of a highly influential sector of the content production industries. Drawing upon the results of the survey, this article reflects on the historical and theoretical difficulties entailed in defining the producer as a professional category, before outlining some of the survey's key findings. In particu…
Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world
For this special section on “geographies of the digital,” we explore how DNA‐based data storage is touted as an alternative to traditional storage modalities and pitched by the data storage industry as a more efficient, stable, and long‐term archival solution than that offered by current technologies. In analyzing how DNA is soaked in the language of sustainability, life, and longevity by those trumpeting the new technology, we situate emergent d…
The Cinema Cities Index: Comparing Urban Cinema Cultures Around the World
Cinema culture varies markedly around the globe and between cities. While this is obvious, the drivers of cinema culture are complex and interact in different ways across different locations and often give rise to a distinct character of localised cinema. This can be witnessed at different scales: across countries, between cities and, on a more granular level, based on localised neighbourhoods. In this article, we apply quantitative methods to in…
Coming Soon (to a Theatre near You): The Temporality of Global Film Distribution to Australia
This article explores the changing contexts of international film exhibition in Australia over a 20-year period (1989-2009) by examining in some empirical detail Australia's position in the global flow of films during this time. It argues that, at the most abstract level, distributors are engaged in the management and mediation of time and space in the field of global communications. It is proposed that distributors, through the organisation of t…
Sheep and the Australian Cinema
The book focuses on two key 'sheep films': The Squatter's Daughter (Hall, 1933) and Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950). Both movies are concerned with the national project, in which sheep growing and nation building are seamlessly aligned. But Verhoeven artfully demonstrates that it is precisely in their emphasis on textual re-iteration and repetition that the sheep films critique an otherwise ostensibly 'national' vision
Twice born: Dionysos Films and the establishment of a Greek film circuit in Australia
From the late 1940s until the late 1970s Melbourne was home to a dynamic Greek cinema circuit made up of some 30 different inner-city and suburban venues operated by a handful of vertically integrated exhibition/distribution businesses. Dionysos Films was amongst the first Greek film exhibition/distribution companies to form in Australia and from 1949 until 1956 it operated with little significant competition, establishing the parameters for a di…
Australian screen adaptations in the AFI Research Collection
(2009). Australian screen adaptations in the AFI Research Collection. Studies in Australasian Cinema: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 325-343
She would say that, he's from Melbourne: Fun and games with Dame Edna and Barry Humphries
This article explores the role that urban place and specifically urban comparison play in the public performances of both the comedian Barry Humphries and the character Edna Everage. In developing Claire Colebrook's analysis of satire as a form of humour that is physically and historically located, we argue that the initial success of Humphries’ satire rests on his elaboration of a specific series of geo-social locations. The article then examine…
‘It was an experience that totally blew up in my face’: Steve Railsback and Turkey Shoot
The schlock horror film Turkey Shoot is widely regarded as one of the most disreputable Australian exploitation titles in a genre already well noted for controversy. This short article frames the controversies that surround the film from production to critical reception, which sets the scene for an interview by Mark Harley with the film's star Steve Railsback, who reflects on the movie's production, his role, the controversy and the film's recept…
Coming Soon (to a Theatre near You): The Temporality of Global Film Distribution to Australia
This article explores the changing contexts of international film exhibition in Australia over a 20-year period (1989-2009) by examining in some empirical detail Australia's position in the global flow of films during this time. It argues that, at the most abstract level, distributors are engaged in the management and mediation of time and space in the field of global communications. It is proposed that distributors, through the organisation of t…
Above the Bottom Line: Understanding Australian Screen Content Producers
The recently completed Australian Screen Producer Survey provides the most current and detailed picture of the culture, motivations and aspirations of a highly influential sector of the content production industries. Drawing upon the results of the survey, this article reflects on the historical and theoretical difficulties entailed in defining the producer as a professional category, before outlining some of the survey's key findings. In particu…
Australian films at large: Expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance
International markets have in recent years become a critical component of the business model for Hollywood cinema, opening up a renewed interest in the global dimensions of film diffusion. Smaller film-producing nations such as Denmark have similarly emphasised global distribution as a key component of the industry's success. Typically, however, claims for Australian film industry success rely almost exclusively on a film's domestic box office pe…
Petal Diagrams: A New Technique for Mapping Historical Change in the Film Industry
As the study of cinema has increasingly turned to the examination of economic ebbs and industrial flows, rather than focussing its attention solely on the critical evaluation of the films themselves, new analytic techniques and tools have been adopted (and adapted) by film scholars. Key amongst these is the use of innovative visualization techniques that can assist in the understanding of the spatial and temporal features of film industry practic…
As Luck Would Have It
This essay explores the ways in which new developments in digital research infrastructure change our expectations of archival research and offer opportunities for a newly energized feminist approach to the archive. A specific platform, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure, is explored as an example of how digital technologies enable the coproduction of the archive and at the same time extend the possibilities for serendipitous discovery.
Agregación de los datos para vincular social en las humanidades y artes creativas: La "Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI)" = Aggregating data for social linking in the humanities and creative …
This paper reports on the development of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI), a service which aggregates data from thirty Australian data sources and makes them available for use by researchers across the humanities and creative arts, and more widely by the general public. We discuss the methods used by HuNI to aggregate data, as well as the conceptual framework which has shaped the design of HuNI’s Data Model around six core entity ty…
The Cinema Cities Index: Comparing Urban Cinema Cultures Around the World
Cinema culture varies markedly around the globe and between cities. While this is obvious, the drivers of cinema culture are complex and interact in different ways across different locations and often give rise to a distinct character of localised cinema. This can be witnessed at different scales: across countries, between cities and, on a more granular level, based on localised neighbourhoods. In this article, we apply quantitative methods to in…
Understanding the dynamics between the United States and Australian film markets: Testing the ‘10% rule’
Australia has historically been an important market for American media exports. As far as film trade relations between the two countries go, there is an anecdotal perception that distributors follow a ‘10% rule’ to predict the popularity of Hollywood titles in Australia, expecting American films to earn around one-tenth of their domestic box office receipts when screened downunder. Nonetheless, as prevalent as this ‘rule’ has been in the industry…
A ‘natural experiment’ in Australian cultural policy: Australian Government funding cuts disproportionately affect companies that produce more new work and have larger audiences
In Australia, cultural policy settings differentiate between purported ‘small-to-medium’ and ‘major’ performing arts organisations, primarily in relation to their revenue size and institutional stability. This article publishes a quantitative analysis of the relative creative outputs of these Australian performing arts organisations, focusing primarily on the production of so-called ‘new works’: original cultural texts, created and performed rece…
Re-Distributing Gender in the Global Film Industry: Beyond #MeToo and #MeThree
This article draws on a big cultural dataset of over 130 million global screen times to consider the impact that the gender of a film's director has on the screening prevalence and geographic spread of new release feature films at the cinema. We compare results based on film screenings between December 2012 and May 2015 across a set of forty countries including the United States, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, and Brazil. This research…
Film, Video, DVD and Online Delivery
This chapter describes a well-worn but now largely by-passed film distribution itinerary, from large public screens to smaller domestic ones through a series of consecutive release ‘windows’. The emergence of small-scale private funding platforms such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and the Australian-based Pozible has been a major development for independent and low-budget filmmakers who do meet the minimum budget threshold for the producer offset. Th…
Controlling for openness in the male-dominated collaborative networks of the global film industry
Studies of gender inequality in film industries have noted the persistence of male domination in creative roles (usually defined as director, producer, writer) and the slow pace of reform. Typical policy remedies are premised on aggregate counts of women as a proportion of overall industry participation. Network science offers an alternative way of identifying and proposing change mechanisms, as it puts emphasis on relationships instead of indivi…
How Do We Live Together Without Killing Each Other?” Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives on Relationality
“How Do We Live Together Without Killing Each Other?” Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives on Relationality
The circus we deserve? A front row look at the organization of the annual academic conference for the Digital Humanities
Academic conferences are considered central to the dissemination of research and play a key role in the prestige systems of academia. And yet the organization of these, and the power systems they maintain, have been little discussed. What is a conference supposed to achieve? Who and what is it for? The annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO)’s Digital Humanities conference is a central occasion in the digital humanities academic…
Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world
For this special section on “geographies of the digital,” we explore how DNA‐based data storage is touted as an alternative to traditional storage modalities and pitched by the data storage industry as a more efficient, stable, and long‐term archival solution than that offered by current technologies. In analyzing how DNA is soaked in the language of sustainability, life, and longevity by those trumpeting the new technology, we situate emergent d…
She Must Be Seeing Things! Gender disparity in camera department networks
Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities
Universities and management consultants are locked in a danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. We are academics with long experience of the consequences of change management and the employment of consultants in universities. Deb is sufficiently "long in the tooth" that her enti…
Gender (im)balance in the Russian cinema: On the screen and behind the camera
The relationship between on-screen and off-screen inequality in film industries and the relative impact of these on movie attendance is widely discussed but not necessarily empirically demonstrated. This article examines the binary gender composition of film project teams and the gendered representation of film characters as factors for cinema attendance. We collected a unique dataset (N=1285) of all films released during the pre-pandemic decade …
Shadow of a doubt: A Network Analysis of Mentoring as a Screen Industry Equity Intervention
Purpose Policies intended to encourage gender equity in the film industry are ramifying and take many forms. This paper uses social network analysis to assess the effectiveness of one popular equity policy, shadowing, a form of mentoring. In shadowing programs, women and gender minorities (WGM) are connected to more experienced members of the industry through attachment to their productions. Design/methodology/approach We constructed real collabo…
Through a glass darkly: Researching workplace discrimination using an identity meta-perception (IMP) lens
This paper presents findings based on a novel approach to researching identity and inequality in the workplace. Our research results from a large survey of camera department employees in the Australian screen industry. Workers were invited to self-nominate various personal identifications, but also to tell us how they thought they were perceived by others. With this information we analysed workplace discrimination in terms of the various possible…
Sociology (16 works) · Art (13 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Movie theater (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (8 works) · Media studies (7 works)