The Obscene Moving Image

The Bulletins of the Ohio Board of Film Censorship were weekly summaries of the eliminations requested of the films that were deemed "approved with eliminations." In order to create this corpus of research, the elimination data from the weekly Bulletins was extracted into plain text files and organized by month, a process described here. Then, for the network visualization, each month of elimination data was individually uploaded into Voyant and the Summary tool was used to select the top 50 most frequently used words for that month. The same Voyant stop words were used in this process that was used in the text analysis: cut, scene, scenes, sub, title, part, showing, close, ft, feet. The data, for each month, of the top 50 most frequent words per month was combined into a single spreadsheet and uploaded to Palladio. The two Palladio network visualizations below are the same data, the only difference is that they have been visually adjusted to make different relationships more prominent. Unfortunately a major limitation of Palladio is that the researcher is unable to embed the visualizations.

Palladio 1

This visualization is not as expanded as one the below, in order to compare the terms unique to the various months with the ones shared by all. As shown on the Censorship Topics page, it is of no surprise to see terms like "fighting" and "smoking," but notice that there are also some non-verbs such as "money" and "room." Most likely these words provided context for the verbs or were part of the sub-titles that were frequently censored. Some terms that are surprising to find as being unique to a single month are "kidnapping" (Oct 15), "steal" (Sept 15), "embraces" and "hell" (Feb 16), "beats" and "binds" (Dec 15), and "gagged" and "poison" (Nov 15). Most of these terms are verbs that one would imagine would have been censored more often, based upon the common topics of censorship.

Palladio 2

This expanded view of the network visualization allows the researcher to focus upon connections between the various months of censorship. Some interesting things to note are the appearance of gender terms throughout the middle of the visualization, such as "wife" and "girls." After the gender breakdown of the Censorship Topics it is clear why these terms are shared amongst the various bulletins. Terms such as "snake" and "bomb" can be seen to the right of the center grouping, these terms were not common enough to make the list of Censorship Topics but will be seen in Elimination Graphs and example film, Shanghaied.