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

1. Kit Hughes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Ohio, where she's working on a book-length project exploring the rise of television within American business and industry. Her research on workplace media, television history, film aesthetics, and the politics of archives has appeared in Media, Culture & Society; Television & New Media; American Archivist; and Film Criticism. Eric Hoyt is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014) and codirector of the Media History Digital Library. He developed the MHDL's search and visualization platform, Lantern, which received the 2014 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Derek Long is a doctoral candidate in film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his research focuses on distribution and production control in early Hollywood. His work has appeared in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television and The New Review of Film and Television Studies, and he is the project director for Early Cinema History Online. Kevin Ponto is Assistant Professor in the Design Studies Department at the school of Human Ecology and in the Living Environments Laboratory at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research explores the fields of virtual reality, wearable technology and visualization. He is the developer of ScripThreads, visualization software used to study the structures of character interactions in screenplays. Tony Tran is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on transnational Vietnamese diasporic media practices and their relationship with urban environments.

2. Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3. Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, vol. 2, 1933 to 1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

4. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

5. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

6. Cynthia B. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

7. Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3–4.

8. Ibid., 4.

9. See “National Recording Preservation Plan,” Library of Congress.

10. Wells H. Barnett Jr., “John Blair & Company: WHB's New National Representatives,” Swing, April 1947, 81.

11. For more on the spot advertising marketplace, see Russo, Points on the Dial, 19–46, 115–150, and Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 152–53.

12. The Arclight software's development, as well as the research discussed in this article, was sponsored by the United States' Institute for Museum and Library Services and Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council as part of a Digging into Data grant. Additional support came from the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and Concordia University's Media History Lab. We would like to thank the Concordia team, led by Charles Acland, for their collaboration throughout the research and development process. Additionally, we wish to thank the Media History Digital Library and its founder and director, David Pierce, for participating in Project Arclight.

13. See List of Wireless Telegraph Stations of the World (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909); 1912 version.

14. International Radiotelegraph Convention, Treaty Series 1913, no. 10, signed in London, July 5, 1912 (His Majesty's Stationary Office, printed by Harrison and Sons). Made available online by the International Telecommunications Union. Conference documents containing the assignment of call letters are available (see pp. 496–500).

15. Radio Stations of the United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of Navigation (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, July 1913), 7.

16. Radio Stations of the United States, 7. The United States Department of Commerce and the Bureau of Navigation made alternative arrangements for the regulation of amateur stations.

17. These figures come from appendix C (Historical Statistics on Electronic Media) in Christopher H. Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 827.

18. An extensive resource for call-sign assignment information is Thomas H. White's website, United States Early Radio History. White's site stands as an excellent example of thriving digital humanities work taking place outside of the academy and the potential for collaboration (and locating new audiences) through digital projects.

19. There are also many instances of broadcasters attempting to retrofit their call signs to their stations. WSB, for example, claims its call letters stand for “Welcome South Brother”; however, WSB appears to have been awarded its letters in sequential order related to a larger chunk of WS- signs.

20. For an example of the interpretive challenges offered by various disambiguation methods, see Seth van Hooland et al., “Exploring Entity Recognition and Disambiguation for Cultural Heritage Collections,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 30, no. 2 (2015).

21. We have uploaded the station data we collected to the Internet Archive and made it available for reuse. The data was collected from Jack Alicoate, ed., The 1948 Radio Annual (New York: Radio Daily, 1948), 291–730.

22. N. W. Ayer & Son's Newspaper Annual Directory (Philadelphia): 1900–1950. We used editions located at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Several editions of the Ayer Annuals are also available online at HathiTrust. The N. W. Ayer & Son data we collected are available for reuse.

23. Ibid.

24. “Protect the Retailer: He's Here to Stay,” Radio Dealer, April 1922, 27. In 1922, The Radio Dealer objected to advertisements for radio tubes and parts that appeared in magazines like Radio Digest, since these ads' invitation to readers to order directly from the manufacturer threatened retailers.

25. See, for instance, “Networks Seek Ways to Halt FCC Action,” Broadcasting, May 12, 1941. See also Victor Pickard, America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 74, 88, 100.

26. All of the above-mentioned journals were sponsored and digitized by the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audiovisual Preservation and the Library of American Broadcasting at University of Maryland, College Park. Their efforts and generosity have enabled the MHDL's Broadcasting Collection to grow to over three hundred thousand pages. The MHDL's 1905–1941 run of Variety (95,996 pages) also contains a great deal of coverage of the broadcasting industry and radio's relationships with vaudeville and film.

27. SES's technical details are described fully in Eric Hoyt et al., “Scaled Entity Search: A Method for Media Historiography and Response to Critiques of Big Humanities Data Research,” Proceedings of IEEE Big Humanities Data (2014).

28. For a more comprehensive discussion of our interpretive method, see our website.

29. If the latter case were our aim, other strategies—such as individually searching each discarded set of call letters with the station's frequency or location to locate relevant hits—could augment the automated SES method.

30. “Old WLAG Reopens; New Letters WCCO,” Radio Digest—Illustrated, October 18, 1924, 3.

31. “Nine Stations Given Maximum Power,” Broadcasting, October 15, 1931, 8.

32. Lev Manovich, “How to Compare One Million Images?” in Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David M. Berry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 249–98.

33. Although beyond the scope of this paper, a second set of questions might explore the advertising rates within each journal and magazine that might have influenced where and how advertisements appeared, or attempt to determine the economic significance of station advertisements to the papers' overall financial health.

34. Russo, Points on the Dial, 12.

35. For more on the role of station representatives in developing markets, see Russo, Points on the Dial, 17–46.

36. It is important to point out that the MHDL coverage of Variety ends in 1941 (as of 2015). WCCO station advertisements began to appear in Variety in 1938 and ran regularly through 1941. Though not accounted for in our SES results, it is highly likely that WCCO ads continued to appear in Variety beyond the early 1940s. When WCCO appears in fan magazines oriented toward the listening public, mentions tend to occur within the context of celebrity profiles, program descriptions, and radio listings. When ads appear, they tend to focus on the appeal of network stars, news, and other programming for potential listeners—rather than the appeal of potential listeners to advertisers and sponsors. See, for example, “The Stars That Shine in the Morning Are on the CBS Radio Network,” TV Radio Mirror, May 1962, 4–5.

37. WCCO's dependence on these outside firms to make such claims is foregrounded in Sponsor, January 20, 1964, 11, which notes that Nielsen would no longer measure local markets, but promises that “the audience is still there—listening and ready to be counted.”

38. Hugh Malcolm Beville, Audience Ratings: Radio, Television, Cable (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988).

39. Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising (New York: Knopf, 1961), 33.

40. “Most-Crowded Newsroom in the Northwest,” Broadcasting, August 16, 1943, 35.

41. For example, see Broadcasting, July 28, 1952, 9, and “Minneapolis WCCO Saint Paul,” Broadcasting, October 15, 1931, 27,. Both of these advertisements stack their figures vertically to simulate a sort of accounting that proves the economic viability of station spots. A similar strategy is evinced in Sponsor , July 20, 1964, 8–9.

42. Indeed, WCCO found itself in a position to be able to use such numbers to its advantage. See “Only on WCCO Radio,” Broadcasting, November 27, 1961, 12–13.

43. This tagline appears both in CBS spot sales advertisements and in station-specific advertisements. See “This New CBS Power,” Broadcasting, January 15, 1940, 4–7, and “Consistently the Largest Audience,” Broadcasting, September 1, 1940, 53.

44. “Gateway to the Great Northwest,” Broadcasting, September 1, 1932, 2.

45. Russo, Points on the Dial, 36.

46. “Big 'Butter and Egg' Man from Paul Bunyan Land!” Sponsor, September 7, 1953, 26.

47. “Great Friends,” Sponsor, October 18, 1953, 93.

48. “Paul Bunyan Would Look Like a Midget . . .” Sponsor, August 9, 1954, 103; “What He Uncovered—We Cover!,” Broadcasting Telecasting, July 11, 1949, 2; “It's Coverage That Counts!,” Broadcasting Telecasting, September 15, 1952, 16; “Maine in Top 50 Markets!,” Broadcasting Telecasting, June 22, 1959, 97.

49. These likely continued, but 1963 marks the end of the journal's run in the MHDL.

50. “Paul Bunyan Networks Are Far Sighted!,” Broadcasting October 28, 1959, 49.

51. “Kandiyohi Calling . . . ,” Broadcasting, July 5, 1943, 7; “Come into a Huddle with Hall,” Broadcasting, August 28, 1944, 120–21; “Nobody Ever Threw a Clock at Lew Brock,” Broadcasting, August 30, 1943, 37; “Adams Says We Just Bombed Berlin Again,” Broadcasting, November 29, 1943, 41.

52. “Count Me In, Cedric!” Broadcasting Telecasting, September 19, 1955, 84–85.

53. “The Other Member of the Family,” Sponsor, February 22, 1954.

54. Russo, Points on the Dial, 35.

55. NBC (WGY), Nunn Stations (WCMI), NoeMoe Stations (KLIF).

56. John Blair and Company (KLIF), Edward Petry & Co (WKMH, KFI).

57. Crowsley Station Representatives (WGY), Henry I. Christal Co. (WGY, KFI).

58. RCA (WCCO), Continental (KFI).

59. Ziv (KFI).

60. Jack Alicoate, ed., The 1938 Radio Annual, 190. See also, for example, WKMH's “33¢ in Detroit,” Broadcasting, November 21, 1949, 5.

61. See also WSG's “An EMPIRE within an Empire,” Broadcasting, February 15, 1936, 47.

62. See also WGY's “No School Today,” Broadcasting, February 27, 1956, 11, which is remarkably similar to the WCCO “Kandiyohi Calling . . .” ad cited above.

Bibliography

• Alicoate, Jack, ed. The 1948 Radio Annual. New York: Radio Daily, 1948.
• Barnouw, Erik. The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Vol. 2, 1933 to 1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• Beville, Hugh Malcolm. Audience Ratings: Radio, Television, Cable. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988.
• Hilmes, Michele. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Hoyt, Eric, Kit Hughes, Derek Long, Keven Ponto, and Anthony Tran. “Scaled Entity Search: A Method for Media Historiography and Response to Critiques of Big Humanities Data Research.”Proceedings of IEEE Big Humanities Data (2014).
• Manovich, Lev. “How to Compare One Million Images?” In Understanding Digital Humanities, edited by David M. Berry, 249–98. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• McChesney, Robert W. Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Meyers, Cynthia B. A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
• Reeves, Rosser. Reality in Advertising, New York: Knopf, 1961.
• Russo, Alexander. Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio Beyond the Networks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
• Sterling, Christopher H., and John Michael Kittross. Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
• Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
• Van Hooland, Seth, Max De Wilde, Ruben Verborgh, Thomas Steiner, and Rick Van de Walle. “Exploring Entity Recognition and Disambiguation for Cultural Heritage Collections.”Literary and Linguistic Computing 30, no. 2 (2015).

Appendix 1. List of Top 100 “Trending” Stations in Media History Digital Library Corpus, via Scaled Entity Search

Notes: These have been postprocessed to remove unacceptably ambiguous results. Affiliation, ownership, and power information is accurate as of the publication of The 1948 Radio Annual. Page hits begin the year of each station’s founding.

Copyright © 2015 (Kit Hughes, Eric Hoyt, Derek Long, Kevin Ponto, and Tony Tran). Media Industries is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online academic journal. As such, we aim to participate in the open exchange of information. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) License. Under this license, this work is available for sharing and noncommercial distribution provided the appropriate attribution is given.