Once Upon A Time When Stars’ Phobias Start; From A Distant To A Close Reading
ONCE UPON A TIME WHEN STARS’ PHOBIAS START;
FROM A DISTANT TO A CLOSE READING
Using Arclight, an online application based on Media History Digital Library (MHDL) corpus, in this self-reflexive paper I will reflect on the process that I explored identifying a coherent topic, conducting iterative searches guided by a preliminary research question, and discussing the findings.
As a digital method tool, Arclight —a data mining and visualization device for film and media history (Projectarclight.org, 2017)— allowed me to search a series of digitally scanned magazines and newspapers for the initial subject that I had in my mind. As a web-based application “that allows users to visualize how terms . . . . trend across the two-million-page corpus of the Media History Digital Library” (Hoyt, Hughes & Acland, 2016, p. 11), it enabled me to explore a topic before 1960 in American media context in order to frame a research question and create a context for further discussion. Arclight gave me the opportunity to learn about a new way of investigating digitally archived sources, and to be “reflexive about how the media of the twenty-first century . . . . shape our engagement with the past” (Hoyt, Hughes & Acland, 2016, p. 1)