The Obscene Moving Image

My name is JB Bilbrey, I am a master's student at Ball State University (Muncie, IN) pursuing two degrees, one in History and one in Creative Writing (focus on screenwriting). In History, for which this project was completed, I focus on U.S. cultural history (specifically film), with a complimentary focus on media in the USSR during the Cold War. I intend to graduate from the History program in Fall 2019 and the Creative Writing program in Spring 2020. I can be contacted on LinkedIn or by email.

Process

This project uses digital text analysis tools to study film censorship in the state of Ohio from 1913-1955. By highlighting the experience of this one state and tracing the evolution of the content censored, this research is a case study within the scholarship of the history of film, and the broader cultural history of the U.S. in the twentieth century. The study expands on our understanding what motivated the censors and what content they focused upon, realizing that in addition to crime (the most commonly cited content in secondary scholarship about censorship), there was a significant censorship of sexual content.

The corpus and context documents were collected from the archive at Ohio History Connection from February 2018 to September 2019, and the texts were studied throughout multiple semesters at Ball State University (Muncie, IN). At the archive pictures were taken of the texts, and those photos were organized using the Tropy organization software, a free, open-source software research photo management tool, creating my personal archive complete with tags and sections. I then ran the pictures of the archival documents through optimal character recognition (OCR) in the Abbyy FineReader program, which turns images and pdfs into text files. For this corpus (September 1915 to February 1916 bulletins) I was able to correct the OCR process as it occurred, meaning I had "clean" files - ones that were free from errors. I then uploaded this corpus into Voyant, a free, open-source web-based text reading and analysis environment. These tools do not short cut the research process nor do they provide analysis, rather they allow the researcher to organize and analyze a large amount of data. This sort of research would be significantly more time intensive without the use of text analysis software. After becoming acquainted with the use of digital tools, I set out to build a website to be the interactive platform for my research. I selected an HTML and CSS template from Templated, which provided a foundation of code that I could change as needed (using the program NoteTab Light to view and edit the code. After I had coded and built the website, I uploaded it to Ball State's host servers using the file transfer program (FTP) FileZilla.

As indicated in the respective sections, there is a difference between the analysis of the bulletins from September 1915 to February 1916 and the bulletins of 1924 through 1954. The close reading of 1915-1916 was the first study I conducted on this corpus, serving as a test to see if it was a viable research project. For that project the OCR process was completely clean - meaning the software was corrected as it "read" the text, making there were no mistakes. I then analyzed that corpus using both traditional close-reading techniques and distant reading using the text analysis software. Since that research proved fruitful, the analysis was extended to cover the rest of the years of the Board. Due to resource constraints, the selected years of bulletins from 1924-1954 were not corrected throughout the OCR process, meaning there were errors. The resource constraints meant that I could either have a small, but clean, corpus or a larger corpus with some errors in the data. Since the goals of the project were to make conclusions about the major topics over the longest portion of time, I decided to have a larger corpus with some errors. As can be seen in the study, the errors in the text did not ruin the analysis.

The case study films were determined by availability of the film and content censored by the Board. The 1915 film, Shanghaied, is examined because there were a significant number of eliminations requested of the film and a restored version was available at The Internet Archive. The Outlaw and M were chosen because the Ohio Board's had significant records regarding the film, there were several eliminations/reasons for the Board's decision, and both were publicly available. These films were also considered because each one of them covers a different major topic of the Board's censorship: violence in the case Shanghaied, sex in the case of The Outlaw, and crime represented by M.

A project based on moving images necessitates the use of a digital platform and methodology. Without the use of digital tools, it would not have been feasible to analyze the large corpus, nor would the presentation of that research have been as effective without the use of embedded tools. Further, the case studies are best presented next to the embedded film where the films can be watched while reading the reports from the censors and following along with the analysis. Digital scholarship is an exciting era for the field where the research process becomes interactive, allowing those visiting the platform to follow along the researcher as they build their argument, and test the researcher's conclusions in real time. Rather than just presenting a static summary of findings, this project is a dynamic resource that presents the audience with the sources, process, and conclusions all at once. Those visiting the website can follow along with my argument while simultaneously examining the evidence, since the embedded text analysis tools allow for real test testing of my conclusions. If this research would have been written in a traditionally written thesis then the reader would not be able to search the text analysis tools nor watch the films while following along with the argument. This is imperative for the case study section of the project, where the ability to watch the film embedded on the web page allows the reader to see the film and read the Board's requested eliminations/reasons for rejection in real time - giving the audience a chance to watch a film from the Board's perspective. This does more than just support the analysis of the bulletins; it provides a necessary perspective on the process of censorship and the Board's requested cuts in the context of an entire film. The reader being able to see the films and censorship from the Board's perspective is essential to a true understanding of the motivations and concerns of the Ohio Board of Film Censorship.

Acknowledgements

This project was created under the direction of Dr. Douglas Seefeldt to fulfill the 3-credit 698 Creative Project completed in Fall 2019, in partial fulfilment for the requirements of a Masters of Arts degree from Ball State University (Muncie, IN). Special thanks to Dr. Douglas Seefeldt and Dr. James Connolly for their guidance and support throughout this project and my degree program. Jake Klinger for his friendship and encouragement throughout the program. Lastly, and most importantly, thanks to my wife Amanda for her patience throughout all the long working hours, trips to the archives, and grad school induced stress - I never would have been able to do it without you.