Categories
Faculty Projects

Architectural Biometrics

img_3121

Architectural Biometrics is a platform that addresses the lack of tools for comparative analysis of spatial data. The platform is inspired by research on the Canadian and Ottoman railways, both of which include an array of prefabricated building designs that display fascinating dissimilarities. 

Categories
Faculty Projects

Bragdon Project

bragdon_46_7__20

The Bragdon Project uses the digital environment to re-create both the structure and the experience of a building that no longer exists: the main railroad station In Rochester between 1914 and 1963.

Categories
Faculty Projects

ReEnvisioning Japan

The digital humanities project ReEnvisioning Japan aims to capture the changing representations of Japan in the twentieth century through the digital preservation of tourism and travel objects as visual and material culture.

Categories
Faculty Projects

Seward Family Digital Archive

home_image

The Seward Family Digital Archive provides unprecedented insight into the life and career of William Henry Seward, and into 19th and early 20th century political, cultural, and family life.The depth and breadth of the collection – which boasts large numbers of pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemeral materials rarely seen in such numbers in an archival collection of this period – has long attracted the attention of scholars from around the world, and has made it UR’s most consulted and prized collection.

Categories
Faculty Projects

Televisual Time

s-l1600

Although presently in its 64th year of publication, TV Guide might be said to be on the verge of becoming doubly obsolete. It is an out-of-date medium—the printed magazine—that provides information about another out-of-date medium, broadcast and cable television. But streaming television services like Netflix and Amazon Prime are only the most recent technological developments that TV Guide has had to weather, the increased availability of cable in the early 1980s being only one.

Categories
Faculty Projects

Virtual St. George’s

Screenshot 2014-10-21 16.16.32

Imagine walking the streets of the oldest living town in British America, able to visit different moments over the past four centuries in order to see both how the town and its residents changed and how the Atlantic world changed around them.

Categories
Faculty Projects

William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is a hypermedia archive featuring scholarly digital editions of the poems, prints, and paintings of William Blake (1757-1787).

Categories
Blog Teaching

Loving Dido

ENG 396 ‘Loving Dido’ is an Honors seminar structured around Virgil’s story of Dido in the Aeneid, and its long literary and cultural afterlife. Students are provided with readings from over two millennia of commentaries, poetry, novels – and viewings of 12 different operatic productions – and discuss the material every week in the context of the original text. There is also a digital component to the course. Professor Tom Hahn believes that a non-traditional course like ‘Loving Dido’, which considers vast arrays of unsorted data on a single subject, is ideally placed to make use of digital tools like content management systems, and the opportunities therein for establishing links and networks between individual items. The omeka-based website run by the class contains nearly 2000 images and video footage inspired by the Dido story. Every week, students post commentaries on selected images, and argue for relationships between the disparate items which moves beyond historical or archival principles. As well as being useful pedagogical tools, such websites promise remarkable possibilities for exploring how humanities material transforms its audience, and is itself transformed, through digital resources.

Categories
Blog Research

Prime Time: Diving into TV Guide

tvguidehabit

In its first semester, Televisual Time encountered some of problems that face many DH projects, specifically around securing a data set; after all, the time-sensitivity of TV Guide epitomizes the ephemerality of the weekly magazine. Case in point: we procured the first few decades on microfilm, but they were reproduced at such a small scale—up to 4 pages vertically per 35mm reel—that they were difficult for us to read, let alone a computer. The next stop, both oddly and predictably, was eBay, where we procured a selection of issues from each decade at random. Our next step was to scan these issues and submit them to OCR, a task that has proved to have its own complications on account of typeface, symbol usage, and the presence of advertising, to name only some issues. 

1998 grid

To the extent that preparing these files for digital analysis remains very much a work in progress, this semester as well as last, our work so far has taken a different page from Williams’ work, which is that of distribution. In his 1973 analysis, Williams worked with a selection of categories: News, Documentaries, Education, Arts and Music, Children’s Programs, Drama, Movies, General Entertainment, Sport, Religion, Publicity, and Commercials. He doesn’t say where his “conventional” categories come from, but for us, TV Guide’s evolving categorization of programming offered a fairly straight-forward mode of reading. In view of our interest in time, we calculated the general distribution of programming, according to contemporary TV Guide categories, in one issue from each decade, and constructed (admittedly rudimentary) charts to display our results.

genre 1953 genre 1966 genre 1977 genre 1985 genre 1998 genre 2001

I say “fairly straight-forward” because even this is not entirely so. Throughout its decades-long run, TV Guide’s categorization of shows is inconsistent and incomplete: not every show gets a category. Upon cursory examination, it seems possible that categories were more often applied to less popular shows—or perhaps local ones—and left off for well-known shows, putting a premium on “culturally relevant” information rather than comprehensive detail. In the 2000s, the magazine has stopped providing genres at all except for movies, the genres for which are distinctly fewer in number.

comedy time

That being said, there are some interesting trends to note that we hope to explore through further analysis. As one example, the chart in the 1980s shows a dramatic uptick in comedies, a development we hypothesize owes to the expansion of cable and the concomitant increase of re-runs. Comedies, as serial shows, are perhaps the most easily syndicated, since they can continue to attract new audiences every week. But whether this is the cause or isn’t—a question still worth exploring—we can also ask how this distribution allows us to think about television’s structuring of time in this period. Thus, another way of thinking about the distribution of comedies is to calculate them in minutes: how long, with the aid of recording technology, one could spend watching all of the comedies on air in a given week. For 1998, this number—13,560 minutes—far exceeds the total number of minutes in a week, being 10,080. It’s an odd comparison, but striking nonetheless.

comedies

As Televisual Time develops, we hope that distant reading will bring new insight to these kinds of qualitative questions and, in turn, to a different way of looking at television’s changing presence over time.


Tracy Stuber is a PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She is a 2015-2017 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities.