Yuri Tsivian is William Colvin Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on silent film, early Russian film, the history of film editing and digital humanities. He is also co-founder of two separate research fields in the analysis of film and culture: Carpalistics and Cinemetrics. The former investigates and compares different types of gestures in theater, the visual arts, literature and film. The latter uses digital tools to analyze the art of film editing. 

With the help of a statistical database that has grown over fifteen years and contains more than 20,000 films, Yuri Tsivian evaluates changes in average shot length (ASL) from a film historical perspective. This method demonstrates developments in film technology and the film industry as well as historical differences in film spectatorship. 

Yuri Tsivian’s publications include Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (2004), Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (1994), Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919 (1989), and numerous essays including “Exploring Cutting Structure in Film, with Applications to the Films of D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin” (with Mike Baxter and Daria Khitrova, in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32/1/2017) and “Charlie Chaplin and His Shadows: On Laws of Fortuity in Art” (Critical Inquiry 40/3/2014).