Variety’s Transformations: Digitizing and Analyzing the First Thirty-Five Years of the Canonical Trade Paper

This article details a major digitization and access project to make Variety’s run from 1905 to 1940 freely available online. It uses multiple quantitative research methods—including distant-reading practices of the Digital Humanities and quantitative content analysis—to argue that Variety’s decisions about when and how to cover the film and radio industries need to be understood as a series of specific internal strategies made in relation to a dynamic business environment. Situating the project’s digitization of Variety as a form of philology, the authors argue that corpus digitization should be considered a scholarly practice, not simply a technical one.