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ABSTRACT: The Media History Digital Library has digitized nearly one million pages of film and media publications, creating new opportunities for gathering evidence and new challenges for interpretation. In this essay, the author, who developed the Media History Digital Library's search engine Lantern, analyzes data on the circulation of historic film periodicals and how frequently scholars have cited the same magazines. The author argues that the field of film studies has concentrated on a small number of canonical titles, such as Variety and Photoplay, and neglected the majority of publications. As an aid to interpreting the broader range of sources now digitally available, the author proposes integrating data visualization and topic modeling with the existing research methods of close reading, search, and archival research.
KEYWORDS: Lantern, Media History Digital Library, media history, data mining, trade press, fan magazines, digital research methods
In his recent Film History essay, "The Pleasures and Perils of Big Data in Digitized Newspapers," Richard Abel acknowledges "how digitized newspapers have greatly aided the decade-long shiftin [his] own scholarly research to focus on the distribution, exhibition, and reception of movies and movie stars in the mid-1910s." As an example, Abel shares an advertisement from Iowa's Oelwein Register that he only discovered through the affordances of full-text searching. Rather than viewing searchable online databases purely as an asset, however, Abel offers the cautionary remark, "the longer I gaze at this and other newspaper pages, the more questions niggle at me: what lies beyond their borders or just offscreen?"1
I suspect that many readers of Film History have felt the same excitement, tinged with a trace of ambivalence, while looking at digitized historical publications on their laptop screens. I'm certainly familiar with the experience. Yet, unlike Abel and most Film History readers, I've had to confront these same questions from the design perspective. David Pierce and I lead the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) (http://mediahistoryproject.org), a nonprofit initiative that digitizes books and magazines relating to the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound for broad public access. Through collaborating with numerous institutions, collections, and donors, we have scanned over 900,000 pages of out-of-copyright publications.2 In the summer of 2013, we were pleased to launch version 1.0 of Lantern (http://lantern.mediahist.org), a search and visualization...