“Robots Reading Vogue” site exploration

Roberts Reading Vogue” is a website created by the Digital Humanities Apartment at Yale University Library. It is a joint website designed by Lindsay King (Haas Arts Library) and Peter Leonard (Digital Humanities Lab) from Yale. The aim of this project was to explore data mining in fashion through texts and images in Vogue to elicit discussions in terms of gender studies and computer science. It may also pertinent to scholar fields, such as sociology and history. This website proposes new ways to engage in fashion field using techniques in digital humanities. The researchers for this website experimented with topic modeling, n-grams, and color analysis and shared their tools and experiments. The website documents detailed experimental methods and resources used for others’ references. Most of their resources have high accessibility.

Source: This website used texts and images from Vogue Magazine materials from Year 1892-2019.

Processes: Each experiment page describes the processes of raw data and includes tools and/or programs used in this experiment. For example, the experiment “Averaging Covers in Vogue” used all existing covers as their sources. They firstly did a “decennial sampling” of the covers. On the website, they explain this process as “overlaying each of the covers for a given year generates a mean RGB value for each pixel.” The researchers then, manually aligned each cover. After this alignment, they generated the pixel averages of the covers.

The ways to process data may be different across their experiments. However, they included the general methods and tools on each experiment page. Some of the programs they used are also available for downloading.

Presentation: The website generally displays experiments via visualization. The presentation may differ among experiments. Some experiments used graphs to present the trend, such as the “n-gram Search” experiment. The researchers used line graphs to present the trend of word usage within ads, articles and texts. The website used histograms to show the visualization of color palettes. Overall, they used graphs, images, videos to present their projects.

With credits to Miriam Posner’s video How Did They Make That? http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that-the-video/

Author: ameliayd

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