The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities eds. by Charles R. Acland and Eric Hoyt (review)

From the tremendous video libraries of YouTube and the Internet Archive to the text collections of the HathiTrust and the Media History Digital Library, media historians today confront the challenge of engaging with an abundance of cultural works and archival materials. For those invested in the digital humanities, this abundance presents an opportunity to transform these materials' availability into data to be studied using a variety of methods.

—Eric Hoyt, Kit Hughes, and Charles R. Acland, "A Guide to the Arclight Guidebook," The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities

This is the opening of the e-book The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, edited by Charles R. Acland and Eric Hoyt. The text sums up the book's subject: scholars' struggle and the hard work they have done over the past years to introduce digital humanities into media history and work with digital tools to expand and broaden their research.

At the same time, various authors also critically evaluate the digital research tools and methods they used for their media historical investigations, making it a very helpful publication for those who need an introduction to digital humanities and media history. Furthermore, it is highly recommended for scholars interested in current developments in the field.

The book answers the following questions: What new skills, competences, and tools are needed when media historians move their research activities into the domain of digital humanities? Toward what new and unanticipated research questions does such a move toward digital humanities lead us? How did this change the workflows in humanities scholarship? And finally, what does that mean?

Project Arclight, from which the book derives, is a collaboration between Concordia University of Montreal in Canada and the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. Its aim is to build new tools to enable media historians to find patterns and trends in media history. This has resulted in the Arclight application that allows scholars to search the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), visualize the search results in several ways, and export the results in various formats, including as an Excel document. This last possibility allows scholars also to use the data for other purposes, as described by Kit Hughes in her article "Field Sketches with Arclight: Mapping the Industrial Film Sector."

The book presents some of Arclight's results and possibilities. Many of its contributors either presented at or chaired the 2015 symposium. Of course, many essays discuss other ongoing projects and research initiatives. This has resulted in an extensive overview of the work done in the United States and Canada in the areas of digital tools in recent media history. It presents a glance into this research practice as well as a good introduction to digital humanities for those media historians who are not (yet) part of this community.

Whereas literary studies, linguistics, and classics have enthusiastically engaged with digital humanities, media history has stayed behind. In their introduction to the book, Hoyt, Hughes, and Acland explain that from the start, "open source technologies for text analysis … were faster and more sophisticated than forms of automated moving image and sound analysis" (3). Therefore the adaptation of media history into the field of digital humanities happened relatively late. Most media scholars had already been using, transforming, and developing the already existing digital tools for analyzing written sources. The turn toward audiovisual analysis, however, remained marginal. Projects like Yuri Tsivian's Cinemetrics were more the exception than the rule.

It is, of course, important that written media historical sources are available and searchable. Nevertheless, digital tools and methodologies for analyzing audiovisual sources remain underdeveloped. The project's leaders, as well as the editors of the book, recognize this as a problem. Still, there is a bias toward written materials in the book. Of the seventeen essays, fourteen discuss work done on written sources, whereas only three consider digital...