Media montage

What questions can we answer using the image data?

A comparison of a large number of newspaper pages allow us to visualize the patterns and change in non-textual elements of the newspaper over time. By non-textual elements, I refer to everything unrelated to the content of the text. Photos, illustrations, propaganda art, cartoons, and even fonts will be taken into conderation as a whole, not separately.

What kind of data visualization would best answer the question?

While the textual data used in the project was used for synchronic analysis, the images can be used for diachronic analysis to evaluate change over time. Instead of using symbolic visualization, such as graphs that represent the data in a idfferent form, the images will simply be rearranged to speak for themselves. The media montage technique is one simple yet effective way of achieving this effect. The image of each page will be laid out side by side to create one large image. This allows the researcher to see the newspaper in a slightly different perspective that is difficult to create without using digital methods.

Creating a media montage

In order to produce a media montage using ImageJ, all the images must be ordered correctly in a separate folder. On ImageJ, click on the File tab, Import, and Image Sequence to select the folder containing the images. Next, create the montage by clicking on the Image tab, Stacks, and Make Montage. From there the resolution and shape of the montage can be customized. I chose a high-resolution montage in order to be able to zoom into the montage and see the image in detail. Lastly, make sure to save the montage as an image file.