Scholars dive into 1.4 million digital pages of media history

From May 13-15, media historians, digital humanities scholars and big data critics from across Canada, the U.K., Australia and the U.S. gathered at Concordia University to participate in the Arclight Symposium.

The aim of Project Arclight is to develop web-based tools to study the rise of 20th-century American media, using the 1.4 million digitized pages of the Media History Digital Library.

For their efforts, Project Arclight received the prestigious international “Digging into Data” grant in 2014, administered through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States).

The symposium, a collaboration between Concordia University (Media History Research Centre) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Media History Digital Library), formed part of the project.

The idea behind the meet-up was to generate a broad discussion on the advances and pitfalls of using digital methods for media history research.

In his opening remarks, Charles Acland, principal investigator for the Concordia team, set out some specific goals: share examples of the use of digital methods in media history, introduce questions and criticisms about contemporary digital methods and seek new modes of analysis appropriate to our context of the massive digitalization of historical materials.

Acland welcomed everyone to engage in these important dialogues, whether or not participants felt “algorithmically literate.”

On the first day of the symposium, Eric Hoyt, principal investigator of the University of Wisconsin-Madison team, provided a hands-on demonstration of the Arclight app, which employs a method called Scaled Entity Search (SES).

To show how media historians can incorporate digital tools like Arclight into their research, Acland and Fenwick McKelvey presented an exploratory micro-study of business terms used in fan and trade publications in the 1930s.

The day ended with a lively keynote address, delivered by film critic and scholar Deb Verhoeven from Deakin University in Australia entitled, “Show me the History! Big Data Goes to the Movies,” in which she outlined several examples of the use of online resources to produce large-scale collaborative research projects on popular culture.

The next two days of the symposium were composed of five panels on an array of topics and issues regarding the use of digital tools in media history research, including the analytical capacities of non-linear editing systems, the use of datasets in historical inquiry and the visualization and mapping of media circulation.

Significant themes began to emerge: the importance of scale (shifting between distant and close reading); the role of critical interpretation of big data; archival matters (copyright and public domain, material fallibility and biases); the necessity of collaboration (among scholars, critics, archivists, librarians and so forth); and the opportunities and limits of crowdsourcing.

The symposium ended with an informative roundtable discussion on media history and digital methods chaired by Paul Moore from Ryerson University. Among the topics covered were best practices, open access and copyright, the publishing landscape in the digital world and, more broadly, the question of how we imagine the relationships between our work as media historians/digital humanists and the university, as well as the world outside the university.

The productive and thought-provoking conversations that arose over the course of three days attest to the success of the Arclight Symposium. The Project Arclight app will be available for use as a web-based tool in the coming months.

Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon is a Humanities doctoral student in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. Her research examines the discursive constitution of celebrity in Canadian culture from the 1960s to the present, using the celebrity phenomenon of Leonard Cohen and his multi-decade career as the object of her research.

Learn more about Project Arclight.