The project I explored was “Robots Reading Vogue.” “Robots Reading Vogue” was a digital humanities project done by researchers Peter Leonard and Lindsay King at Yale University who wanted to amalgamate “disparate research interests,” such as fashion and data-mining. Vogue boasts its extensive amount of issues as it is one of the longest published magazines; it has been continually published for over a century. This meant that there was an extensive dataset given to Leonard and King to analyze trends and magazine techniques Vogue has utilized through the years. Through analyzing the images, connotations, and implications both implicit and explicit in the magazine, many patterns were discovered. These trends ultimately helped researchers prod questions regarding gender norms and computer science.
A portion of this project involved 200 memos from Diana Vreeland, former editor-in-chief of the American Vogue. By using the Markov chains model, the memos were generated with words Vreeland would often use. By obtaining the many words Vreeland often used and her memos, parallels were seen between her memos and the ardent substance of magazine itself through juxtaposition. Vreeland was known to be a passion-filled and imaginative editor-and-chief; King and Leonard were able to spot this same passion and imagination translated into the magazine’s photography and fashion styles. Vreeland supported ideas that were non-conventional. Viewing original memos from Vreeland rendered the researchers to deduce that the magazine gained exponential momentum and thrived due to the original ideas explicitly harnessed in the content of the magazines.
Vreeland shares that the magazine should be “drastically controversial.”
Another trend that was noted by King and Leonard was through the Vogue magazine covers, a major source in their project. After numerous magazine covers were compiled they were organized by year and then most likely statistically processed into slice histograms. King and Leonard programmed these magazine covers to produce slice histograms with the covers organized by year. They presented the slice histograms on the website. By including the actual magazine covers, a trend was easily spotted and viewers could easily tell by seeing all the covers in one histogram that there was an obvious trend. Similar colors: reds, pinks, yellows, and blues, were consistently used in many recent covers. Furthermore, by visualizing histograms since the early 1900s, the transition between black and white printing to colored printing can be noted. By employing a small video compiling slice histograms from the early 1900s to the 2000s, viewers can also observe that the colors have become more saturated and bright over time. In creating a video visualization of histograms over time, the notion of “the medium is the message” by Marshall McLuhan was deftly demonstrated by King and Leonard. By fusing the media of video and statistical graphs to one visualization, King and Leonard facilitate viewers to notice the color change trends of Vogue with ease.
As shown through the slice histograms from 1904, 1934, 1966, 1991, and 2010 respectively, one can note the color changes in Vogue Magazine’s covers.
Samantha, I completely agree with your analysis of Robots Reading Vogue. I think it’s particularly interesting how you highlighted the fact that Vreeland’s daredevil attitude was vital to Vogue’s success. Also, I believe that King and Leonard did an amazing job of visually representing their analysis.
I really liked how you provided further narratives to explain the motives behind these projects rather than simply stating how they were created. I felt more intimate to learn about the authors and the editor-in-chief. Also, the bits of humor (like the memo caption), made the blog post more engaging! I look forward to your future posts!