Robots Reading Vogue Homepage
As someone who is passionate about fashion and looking to pursue a career in the industry, I naturally wanted to learn more about the Robots Reading Vogue project. I thought it was a beautiful way to use data to tell a story about the evolution of fashion the magazines impacts on pop culture.
At Yale University, Digital Humanities Librarian Peter Leonard and Lindsay King were searching for digitized texts that would spark inspiration for DH projects. Using the services of Condè Nast and ProQuest, they were able to discover a digital archive of information on Vogue. The copious amounts of publications over 100 years would provide plenty of information for such a project. After purchasing the rights to the information, the authors along with interested students and faculty conducted analyses to detect trends over time, changes and similarities in overall themes and so on. Taking information from over a century’s worth of information, 2700 covers, 6 TB of data, and hundreds of thousands of pages, Digital Humanities Librarian, Peter Leonard and Lindsay Kang synthesized all of this information in a project that juxtaposed the different fields of fashion and statistics
The project is laid out in a very intuitive format. The home page lays out the various experiments that the authors conducted. There is an image and a line that summarizes the purpose of that specific experiment to give the reader a bit of an idea before reading more. If the reader wants, there is an explore button on all of the experiments and that links to another page with more a lot more information on the research. On this page there are moving graphics, text and processing information to give the reader a lot more knowledge on this research and their findings.
One specific experiment in the project that I liked was their Slice Histogram section. It showed how the magazine covers evolved over time. They got more colorful and saturated. The processing software that was used was imagemagick to create the bitmap images for their histogram. This was a really cool graph to read because it was an animated time-lapse so the viewer can see how it gradually changed. They also did a side by side of two distinct years and it the differences are really fascinating. Not only does it show advancement in technology but also trends in advertising. For example, in another experiment, Colormetric Space, they highlighted a trend in the 80s where the covers predominantly had faces that were zoomed in more than any other period of time.
Often data analysis can be extremely dry but this project was a great way to make data approachable to narrate the evolution of such a groundbreaking magazine.
Hi!
Great job in reverse engineering this project. It was clear and the links to the Slice Histogram and Colormetric Space, as well as their descriptions, were helpful. When you said that this project “was a beautiful way to use data to tell a story about the evolution of fashion,” I agreed with you that DH projects should aim to tell a story rather than just broadcast information. I also like how you tied in your passion and plans in the fashion industry as the reason why you chose to examine this project!
Hi! I really enjoyed reading your post. I didn’t reverse engineer this project but I found yours helped explain it to me really well! I appreciate the clarity in your post as well as how you discussed the different visual graphs and data they had, and linked to them in your post. Furthermore, your post was really informative and enjoyable to read! Good job!