Yves Saint Laurent once famously said, “fashions fade, style is eternal.” Vogue – the veritable fashion bible and century-old institution – has been there to capture it all. The site, Robots Reading Vogue, created by Yale Digital Humanities Librarians Peter Leonard and Lindsay King, seeks to analyze Vogue‘s stylistic, visual, and thematic changes over the years by means of data-mining.
Sources
The project takes its information from the Vogue archive, a database established in 2011, containing each of Vogue‘s issues since its creation in 1892. With a dataset of 2700 covers, 400,000 pages, 6 TB of data, the researchers were able to begin work on this multi-disciplinary endeavor, covering topics ranging from gender to computer science.
Processing
In order to efficiently analyze data, Yale researchers needed to organize the datasets in subcategories, organized by date, color, model’s cover placement, word usage, advertisements, and overall statistics of the magazine (circulation, price per issue, number of pages per year). Based on these subcategories, researchers were able to do experiments using tools such as n-gram Search, color analysis, and topic modeling.
Presentation
In order to display their data and findings, the researchers at Yale created a user friendly, intuitive site. This is evident in the site’s usage of slice histograms, plots, tables, graphs, and word clouds. These visual manifestations of data create an easily accessible way for any audience to gather information on the history and evolution of Vogue.
I really like how you formatted your post! The header is engaging, the sections are split clearly, and the word cloud is placed next to the information rather than above or below it. You also linked extra information for us to look into which is helpful. Your introduction is also engaging in a way that makes me want to keep reading, thanks for sharing!