Visual Trends in Pressbook Covers

Applying large-scale computational analyses to the history of cinema.

Digitizing pressbooks and other materials from film history provides a range of benefits for scholars. In addition to making these incredible materials more widely available and searchable, digitization also opens up new opportunities for computational analysis.

Visit the Pressbooks Collection page to browse all of the pressbooks digitized in the Media History Digital Library.

Image Brightness

This scatter plot shows the average brightness of each pressbook cover, as measured by the average "perceived brightness" of each pixel in the image. While a rough approximation, this measure makes it possible to compare the brightness of pressbooks over time. This large-scale analysis offers a unique perspective on general trends in how Hollywood's publicity machine evolved over time. In future work, we plan to assess the design trends among individual studios: did the "Poverty Row" studios have more vibrant (or even garrish) design language than the majors? And how did studio standardize their pressbook design over the 20th century?

Hover over a point to view details. Click a point to prevent the popup from disappearing. Due to how images are stored, it may take a few seconds for the cover image to load/update each time.

Visualization and data analysis by Ben Pettis.

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Source Code

Code for this visualization can be found in the GitHub repository for this project.

Image brightness and contrast data is computed using the Python Image Library (PIL). See the Pillow documentation for more information.

The scatter plot is created using D3 and Plot from Obvservable. See the D3 and Plot documentation for more information.