This text analysis project was created by Yale University Librarians Peter Leonard and Lindsay King, both of whom come from very different backgrounds. Leonard is involved in Digital Humanities research, while King is an arts librarian with an interest in fashion. Bringing together both of their interests, they created this project that united two quite disparate topics, fashion and data mining. The corpus here is Vogue Magazine, in which through this website, individuals can explore many different questions that arise from it. For instance, one page on the website explores the different covers of Vogue over time. It allows one to visualize continuity and change without having to close-read every issue of Vogue front to back. Statistical methods have been used here to suggest themes and topics that have been consistent throughout time. There’s a page on the website where a program “reads” all the articles ever published by Vogue and produces a word cloud to show the most used words across all the magazine editions. There is another page that will separate all the magazine covers ever produced by Vogue into color hues, saturations and light variations.
So much information is condensed incredibly quickly by these computer programs that filter through all the data to produce an end-goal. I interpreted the research question throughout this whole website to be how data from Vogue can be quickly analyzed into any relevant theme. It is clear they wanted to form programs that would do just this, to prove that data can be quickly interpreted without the need to close-read every detail. In terms of the type of text analysis, there are multiple different ones being used. As I mentioned before, they used word count and topic modeling to produce results, but there are also numerous other types being used for the most holistic approach. Overall, I find the design of the website to be very appealing, providing a source that is incredibly easy to use and is intriguing to explore. It’s amazing how they really did essentially create “robots” to read and interpret every issue of Vogue magazine. It makes me wonder how many other things this could be used for if it works this well with just a magazine.
