I have chosen to explore and attempt to reverse engineer Robots Reading Vogue. The use of Vogue magazines created an intriguing digital humanities project that appealed to all ages. Vogue magazine is one of the few to consistently be prominent over the past century. This project brings together and compares fashion and data throughout the years. We are able to see the growth of gender through data and also use images to show statistics, popularity, and magazine covers visually.
Robots Reading Vogue: http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/
Robots Reading Vogue contains a variety of sources in the project to display the data in different ways. Images plays a major role in not only showing how magazine covers have changed throughout the years, but also showing similarities. When you click the file Averaging Covers in Vogue, the first thing you see is a timeline starting from 1900 going all the way to 2000. Every ten years is represented by an image. The image represents the similarities of all the covers for that year. The darker more prominent areas of the magazine cover shows the correlation and repetition between the covers for that year. We also see other sources such as text and numbers in charts comparing data. In the n-gram Search we see a combination of text and numbers in the graph. The graph tracks the amount of words per year starting at 1900 going all the way through 2010. You can also click anywhere on the graph to visually see texts talked about that year. This brings together text and numbers in one graph allowing us to compare the data and visually see it throughout the years.
The following image is a screenshot of the home page:
As you can see when you open the home page it is broken down and processed into segments. Each segment displays different data in a different way. The home page is divided into ten different parts with each part having a focus of a particular data. For example one segment is titled Slice Histograms. When you click into the segment it shows you the coloring and saturation of a particular year in a slice histogram. It then has an animation to show you histograms throughout the years so you can compare them and see how they changed over time.
The website is easily accessible and presented in a simple format that anyone can work. The graphs are interactive and provide an enjoyable way to view data on a highly prized magazine.
Hi Karina,
I really appreciate your piece on Robots Reading Vogue. I found the project to be a bit challenging and overwhelming when I first explored it as a potential topic for myself, however, now that I have read through your breakdown of the piece, it makes much more sense! Your specific references to links in the project make it easy to follow because you are able to locate where you are in the site. Thanks for your post!!