{"id":872,"date":"2017-10-09T13:35:15","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T20:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/?p=872"},"modified":"2017-10-09T13:36:17","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T20:36:17","slug":"robots-reading-vogue-blog-post-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/2017\/10\/09\/robots-reading-vogue-blog-post-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Robots Reading Vogue: Blog Post 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTION<\/strong>:
\nThe project I chose to explore was the Robots Reading Vogue<\/a> project, conducted by the Digital Humanities department at Yale University Library. The creators of this unique Digital Humanities project aimed to bridge a gap between two subjects that appear to be of completely different research interests; those two subjects are fashion and data mining. Vogue was the perfect tool to gather an immense amount of data in the field of fashion, having been published for a century on both a mainstream and international level. The researchers at Yale University were able to access raw files of Vogue’s past publications, including their archives. Yale University Library purchased a perpetual access license, allowing the researchers to dig even deeper into all text and image files published associated with Vogue internationally. The sheer number of magazines that had been published by Vogue was undoubtedly enough data for any researcher to analyze, and all it took was a digital humanist to use knowledge of topic modeling, color analyses, and immense digitalization to create this incredible project.<\/p>\n

SOURCES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Created as a joint project between Lindsay King from the Haas Arts Library facility and Peter Leonard from the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale, King and Leonard site their sources for this project as Vogue Material ©Conde Nast 1892-2017 and Vogue Archive material ©ProQuest 2012-2017. This project takes advantage of Vogue’s 2,700 past covers, including 400,000 pages, and 6TB of data to conduct several experiments manipulating this vast amount of data.<\/p>\n

The bibliography<\/a> cited on the Robots Reading Vogue page also grants credit to various external sources including Grace Coddington, current Creative Director of US Vogue, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n

PRESENTATION:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are 10 experiments presented together on a home page, with click-through links to explore the findings of that specific means of manipulation of Vogue’s data.<\/p>\n

The co-creators also publicized the product of this digital humanities project in various press sources, academic publications, and in-person presentations. Press citations include that of Yale Daily News and Yale News and Lindsay King and Peter Leonard presented their work in several institutions both domestically and internationally; King and Leonard’s presented from LIM College, New York to Ann Arbor, Michigan to Lyon, France. This ten-minute YouTube video<\/a> shows King and Leonard presenting Robots Reading Vogue at LIM College, New York in October 2013.<\/p>\n

PROCESSING:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ten experiment presentations displayed on the Robots Reading Vogue webpage display how the vast amount of data from Vogue and Vogue archives was processed. These experiments include data visualizations of color patterns in Vogue issues, visual continuity of the average look of a Vogue cover categorized by decade, n-gram search for word usage comparison across all 400,000 pages of every Vogue ever published, topic modeling of themes organized according to word co-occurrence, and more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The data was processed and translated in a user-friendly and easily digestible manner. For example, the cover averages experiment clicks-through to a text and accompanying photo post to explain how King and Leonard used a combination of manual labor and average RGB values for the pixels of all Vogue covers in one year, every ten years of Vogue publications. A high amount of risk was associated with this project in particular; there was a large amount of manual labor put into hand-crafting each graphic to ensure static repetition of Vogue images was accurate, and the researchers were not guaranteed to find anything of value after it was done. However, their work paid off and the visualizations are striking; there is repetition in the imagery shown through the aggregated averages of pixels from covers throughout the year for each ten-year period, some ten-year period patterns more obvious than others. The immense amount of time and effort put into the processing of the vast amount of data the researchers had at their disposal pays off greatly in instances like this one; the project Robots Reading Vogue is a product of sophisticated data processing and subsequent information mining, making it a successful and admirable digital humanities project.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTION: The project I chose to explore was the Robots Reading Vogue project, conducted by the Digital Humanities department at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}