Hacking Radio History’s Data: Station Call Signs, Digitized Magazines, and Scaled Entity Search

Abstract

Abstract:This article uses scaled entity search (SES), a data mining technique and interpretive framework, to analyze radio stations' strategies of self-distinction and promotion within the broadcasting trade press. The authors model the technique by comparing the frequency of mentions of over two thousand call signs within the 1.5 million page digitized corpus of the Media History Digital Library. Using the ranked distribution of about two thousand results, the article compares the strategies of a top-trending station, WCCO Minneapolis, to those of stations at the twenty-fifth, fiftieth, and seventy-fifth percentile of results to achieve a bird's-eye view of station advertising practices across a much larger field of practice than is possible with traditional close reading. Although the prominence of often dramatic and eye-catching advertisements in journals such as Broadcasting and Sponsor suggest that station advertising was a widespread industrial practice, SES indicates that the practice was primarily taken up by only the largest stations, those with (local and national) network affiliation, and those represented by highly active station intermediaries. Keywords: Radio, Broadcasting, Historiography, Big Data, RegionalismThe study and preservation of American radio is in the midst of a renaissance. The foundational works of American radio history explored the significance of key policies, 2 the dominance of the national networks, 3 the programs carried by those networks, 4 and the influence of the medium on listeners and American culture. 5 Recently, media historians have built upon this body of scholarship by complicating and expanding upon our understanding of radio as an industry and cultural form. Cynthia B. Meyers's A Word from Our Sponsor explores the pivotal role of advertising agencies in producing golden age American radio. 6 In Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks, Alexander Russo "challenge[s] the image of radio during the network era as monolithic and static" and calls on scholars to pay more attention to the dynamic role of local stations within the industry. 7 He argues, "there is much more work that needs to be done to explain how local broadcasters operate as local entities, how their practices extend into the national and the global, and how they produce experiences that register as meaningful to listeners on multiple levels." 8 The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), launched in 2014 by