Variety’s Transformations: Digitizing and Analyzing a Showbiz Giant

In this presentation, Eric Hoyt discusses the efforts of his research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to, first, digitize Variety’s 1905-1940 run for open access and, second, employ computational analysis to better understand this important entertainment trade paper’s change over time. Using multiple research methods—including statistical content analysis and the distant reading practices of scaled entity search and topic modeling—Hoyt argues that Variety’s decisions about when and how to cover the vaudeville, film, and radio industries need to be understood as a series of specific internal strategies made in relation to a dynamic business environment. Situating his team’s digitization of Variety as a form of philology, Hoyt argues that digitization should be considered a scholarly practice, not simply a technical one.

Eric Hoyt is an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014) and co-director of the Media History Digital Library, which has digitized over 1.5 million pages of books and periodicals related to film and broadcasting history. Hoyt is the lead developer of Lantern and one of the directors of Project Arclight, which received a Digging into Data grant from the U.S.’s Institute for Museum and Library Services and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His current book project combines archival research, close reading, and computational distant reading to examine the history of the American film industry’s trade press.