I hold a PhD in History from Queen’s University in Canada (2015). My research interests include cultural history, intellectual history, educational history (American schooling and global education policy), the history of journalism, and the history of knowledge. I am a Core Member of the Theory and History of Education International Research Group https://theirgroup.wordpress.com/ I can be reached at acole3@gmail.com.
A Cultural Analytic Study of Facial Imagery in Time Magazine, 1923–2014. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 14(1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.10047, 2024
We extracted and categorized images of human faces from a digitized Time magazine archive of issu... more We extracted and categorized images of human faces from a digitized Time magazine archive of issues published from 1923 to 2014. The data revealed several large-scale trends that are consistent with the historical context of the magazine. We found that faces are more likely to be smiling in the context of advertisements compared to other contexts, that women are more likely to be smiling than men in all contexts, and that women’s faces are more likely to be found in advertisements than men’s faces. We observed trends in the presence of racialized faces: African American faces increased more or less linearly, reaching approximately proportional representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, while the appearance of faces categorized as Asian peaked in 1970. We interpret these trends through a theoretical framework that connects them to larger events in American history.
We present metadata of labeled faces extracted from a Time magazine archive that contains 3,389 i... more We present metadata of labeled faces extracted from a Time magazine archive that contains 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2012. The data we are publishing consists of three subsets: Dataset 1) the gender labels and image characteristics for each of the 327,322 faces that were automatically-extracted from the entire Time archive, Dataset 2) a subset of 8,789 faces from a sample of 100 issues that were labeled by Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers according to ten dimensions (including gender) and used as training data to produce Dataset 1, and Dataset 3) the raw data collected from the AMT workers before being processed to produce Dataset 2. Introduction Time magazine is an American weekly news magazine that has been published continuously since 1923, when it was founded by Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden with the goal of concisely summarizing current events in a manner that could be digested in around one hour. 1 Its news coverage was (and remains) characterized by a person-centric perspective, which often takes the form of photographs of featured individuals. After its inception, Time quickly became the most popular news magazine in the United States and, due to its presence as a staple of mainstream news consumption, it has both reflected and influenced American popular attitudes, perhaps more than any comparable publication. Time's continuous publication over the last nearly one hundred years, along with its position as a powerful popular cultural influence, makes it a unique vehicle for exploring trends in American society, including the centrality of images to twentieth and twenty-first culture, economics, and politics. 2 In our study, we focused upon how Time reflected this visual sensibility through images of individual faces. Tracking and analyzing the faces that appear in the magazine, through both digital-analytic and traditional humanistic means, offers a sense of what type of people-as represented through photographic depictions of their faces-were considered culturally significant throughout the different eras of the magazine's publication.
We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues dating from 1... more We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues dating from 1923 to 2014, classified the gender of each extracted face, and discovered that the proportion of female faces contained within this archive varied in interesting ways over time. The proportion of female faces first peaked in the mid-to-late 1940s. This was followed by a dip lasting from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. The 1970s saw another peak followed by a dip over the course of the 1980s. Finally, we see a slow and steady rise in the proportion of female faces from the early 1990s onwards. In this paper, we seek to make sense of these variations through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on psychology, visual studies (in particular, photography theory), and history. Through a close reading of our Time archive from the 1940s through the 1990s, we conclude that the visual representation of women in Time magazine correlates with attitudes toward women in both the historical context of the era and the textual content of the magazine. Beginning with its inception in 1923, Time magazine, perhaps more than any other comparable publication, has both reflected and influenced American popular attitudes toward domestic and global politics. This includes the changing ideas about women since the mid-twentieth century, which is the subject of this paper. Our approach was twofold. We used supervised machine learning to extract visual images of faces from an archive of Time magazine, which contains 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, and computationally classified the faces as male or female. We then closely read selected Time articles to make sense of this quantitative data against the background of postwar feminism and the history of the magazine itself. Our focus is on the period between the 1940s and the 1990s, which witnessed significant changes in attitudes toward women, and where our data of the proportion of female faces exhibits significant fluctuation. We found four clear phases in the visual representation of women in Time from the 1940s to the 1990s: a peak in the mid-to-late 1940s, a dip from the mid-1950s to
The Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan is now widely recognized as one of the great theorists and ... more The Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan is now widely recognized as one of the great theorists and commentators on modernity in the post-1945 period. Yet he himself was not a modernist in any simple sense of the word. He consistently engaged with modernity, but did so in order to undermine it in favour of a pre-modern conception of the world inspired by his intense relationship with Catholicism. McLuhan was, in fact, an arch antimodernist, which makes his role as an " expert " on technological modernity and education within Bill Davis' self-consciously progressive 1960s Ontario (Canada) Department of Education a deeply ironic one. In this paper, I use that paradoxical relationship to bring out the full complexity of McLuhan's interconnected ideas on modernity, antimodernity, Catholicism, and school reform, while shedding light on his unique status as a public intellectual during Canada's 1960s. I end by suggesting that both McLuhan's and Davis' approaches to reform constituted influential (and troubling) steps toward neoliberalism in contemporary education.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century – from the years of the Fordist welfare state... more Throughout the second half of the twentieth century – from the years of the Fordist welfare state to those of the post-Fordist neo-liberal order – educational systems in the West have fostered ambitious schemes promoting wide-ranging ‘progressive change.’ Equally ambitious Marxist critiques have targeted education’s regulatory role within the capitalist system. In the early twenty-first century, as privatization and the radical subordination of educational aims and objectives to the demands of capital (‘neo-liberalism’) become unavoidable topics of educational debate, resistance to such neoliberal projects demands a rigorous reconnaissance of the achievements and limitations of radical educational thought. After canvassing major critics of mainstream schooling inside North America and beyond, we suggest that a radical retrieval of the insights of C. B. Macpherson and especially Antonio Gramsci can move us far beyond both reductionist Marxism and unreflective liberalism. We take a third position – embodying an individualist and collective pedagogy – in which the much-maligned ‘liberal arts’ stand against ‘possessive individualist’ education reform.
A Cultural Analytic Study of Facial Imagery in Time Magazine, 1923–2014. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 14(1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.10047, 2024
We extracted and categorized images of human faces from a digitized Time magazine archive of issu... more We extracted and categorized images of human faces from a digitized Time magazine archive of issues published from 1923 to 2014. The data revealed several large-scale trends that are consistent with the historical context of the magazine. We found that faces are more likely to be smiling in the context of advertisements compared to other contexts, that women are more likely to be smiling than men in all contexts, and that women’s faces are more likely to be found in advertisements than men’s faces. We observed trends in the presence of racialized faces: African American faces increased more or less linearly, reaching approximately proportional representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, while the appearance of faces categorized as Asian peaked in 1970. We interpret these trends through a theoretical framework that connects them to larger events in American history.
We present metadata of labeled faces extracted from a Time magazine archive that contains 3,389 i... more We present metadata of labeled faces extracted from a Time magazine archive that contains 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2012. The data we are publishing consists of three subsets: Dataset 1) the gender labels and image characteristics for each of the 327,322 faces that were automatically-extracted from the entire Time archive, Dataset 2) a subset of 8,789 faces from a sample of 100 issues that were labeled by Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers according to ten dimensions (including gender) and used as training data to produce Dataset 1, and Dataset 3) the raw data collected from the AMT workers before being processed to produce Dataset 2. Introduction Time magazine is an American weekly news magazine that has been published continuously since 1923, when it was founded by Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden with the goal of concisely summarizing current events in a manner that could be digested in around one hour. 1 Its news coverage was (and remains) characterized by a person-centric perspective, which often takes the form of photographs of featured individuals. After its inception, Time quickly became the most popular news magazine in the United States and, due to its presence as a staple of mainstream news consumption, it has both reflected and influenced American popular attitudes, perhaps more than any comparable publication. Time's continuous publication over the last nearly one hundred years, along with its position as a powerful popular cultural influence, makes it a unique vehicle for exploring trends in American society, including the centrality of images to twentieth and twenty-first culture, economics, and politics. 2 In our study, we focused upon how Time reflected this visual sensibility through images of individual faces. Tracking and analyzing the faces that appear in the magazine, through both digital-analytic and traditional humanistic means, offers a sense of what type of people-as represented through photographic depictions of their faces-were considered culturally significant throughout the different eras of the magazine's publication.
We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues dating from 1... more We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues dating from 1923 to 2014, classified the gender of each extracted face, and discovered that the proportion of female faces contained within this archive varied in interesting ways over time. The proportion of female faces first peaked in the mid-to-late 1940s. This was followed by a dip lasting from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. The 1970s saw another peak followed by a dip over the course of the 1980s. Finally, we see a slow and steady rise in the proportion of female faces from the early 1990s onwards. In this paper, we seek to make sense of these variations through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on psychology, visual studies (in particular, photography theory), and history. Through a close reading of our Time archive from the 1940s through the 1990s, we conclude that the visual representation of women in Time magazine correlates with attitudes toward women in both the historical context of the era and the textual content of the magazine. Beginning with its inception in 1923, Time magazine, perhaps more than any other comparable publication, has both reflected and influenced American popular attitudes toward domestic and global politics. This includes the changing ideas about women since the mid-twentieth century, which is the subject of this paper. Our approach was twofold. We used supervised machine learning to extract visual images of faces from an archive of Time magazine, which contains 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, and computationally classified the faces as male or female. We then closely read selected Time articles to make sense of this quantitative data against the background of postwar feminism and the history of the magazine itself. Our focus is on the period between the 1940s and the 1990s, which witnessed significant changes in attitudes toward women, and where our data of the proportion of female faces exhibits significant fluctuation. We found four clear phases in the visual representation of women in Time from the 1940s to the 1990s: a peak in the mid-to-late 1940s, a dip from the mid-1950s to
The Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan is now widely recognized as one of the great theorists and ... more The Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan is now widely recognized as one of the great theorists and commentators on modernity in the post-1945 period. Yet he himself was not a modernist in any simple sense of the word. He consistently engaged with modernity, but did so in order to undermine it in favour of a pre-modern conception of the world inspired by his intense relationship with Catholicism. McLuhan was, in fact, an arch antimodernist, which makes his role as an " expert " on technological modernity and education within Bill Davis' self-consciously progressive 1960s Ontario (Canada) Department of Education a deeply ironic one. In this paper, I use that paradoxical relationship to bring out the full complexity of McLuhan's interconnected ideas on modernity, antimodernity, Catholicism, and school reform, while shedding light on his unique status as a public intellectual during Canada's 1960s. I end by suggesting that both McLuhan's and Davis' approaches to reform constituted influential (and troubling) steps toward neoliberalism in contemporary education.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century – from the years of the Fordist welfare state... more Throughout the second half of the twentieth century – from the years of the Fordist welfare state to those of the post-Fordist neo-liberal order – educational systems in the West have fostered ambitious schemes promoting wide-ranging ‘progressive change.’ Equally ambitious Marxist critiques have targeted education’s regulatory role within the capitalist system. In the early twenty-first century, as privatization and the radical subordination of educational aims and objectives to the demands of capital (‘neo-liberalism’) become unavoidable topics of educational debate, resistance to such neoliberal projects demands a rigorous reconnaissance of the achievements and limitations of radical educational thought. After canvassing major critics of mainstream schooling inside North America and beyond, we suggest that a radical retrieval of the insights of C. B. Macpherson and especially Antonio Gramsci can move us far beyond both reductionist Marxism and unreflective liberalism. We take a third position – embodying an individualist and collective pedagogy – in which the much-maligned ‘liberal arts’ stand against ‘possessive individualist’ education reform.
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