Communication Arts is excited to share that the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The Humanities Advancement Grant of $148,428 will support their upcoming work for “Project Ballyhoo: Analyzing Publicity Text and Promotional Image Reuse across 20th Century Periodical Collections.” The work extends the WCFTR’s recent success in winning extramural grants, which has included major support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, NEH Division of Preservation and Access, and American Council of Learned Societies (the last of which resulted in the recently published open access book, Global Movie Magazine Networks).
Project Ballyhoo builds upon the rich collections of the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), a searchable resource, led by Professor Eric Hoyt and the WCFTR, that contains over 3 million pages of historic film and broadcasting magazines available for broad online access. One of the MHDL’s recent priorities has been to scan hundreds of Hollywood pressbooks—bound pamphlets of promotional materials that studios sent to exhibitors, with the hope that theater managers would place advertisements and publicity text in local newspapers. How widely did the publicity text and promotional images circulate? What did they mean for how readers received information and understood culture? Project Ballyhoo seeks to answer these questions, and, in the process, enhance computational methods for analyzing text and image reuse that will be useful for many other research projects.
Professor Hoyt, the Director of the WCFTR and Kahl Family Professor of Media Production, is excited to use this funding to apply similarity detection algorithms at a large scale to the digitized pressbooks and historic magazine and newspaper collections. Professor Hoyt hopes these press books will shed light on “how much of American journalism during the 20th century consists of publicity articles and press releases that newspapers are taking and scrambling words here or there or cutting out some lines and essentially reproducing.”
This project will advance two of NEH’s program priorities: the refinement of innovative methods and enhancement of digital infrastructure. By leveraging resources at UW–Madison, including the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) and the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), Project Ballyhoo will benefit communities in film, media, journalism, mass communication, history, digital humanities, and beyond.
Prior to winning this grant, the WCFTR was engaged in lots of testing and pilot work to prepare for Project Ballyhoo. Hoyt highlighted this work as a key reason why they were a strong candidate for this grant. “We can write a better proposal if we can show NEH what the work will look like,” he said. Similarly, Hoyt emphasized that the pressbook scanning his team completed over the past three years was foundational for Project Ballyhoo’s success. The pressbook scanning was enabled thanks to the generous support of Matthew and Natalie Bernstein, Kelly and Kimberly Kahl, and Stephen P. Jarchow.
The WCFTR research team for Project Ballyhoo will consist of Eric Hoyt (Director WCFTR and MHDL), Sam Hansen (Data Scientist, Database Developer, and Digital Archivist), Mary Huelsbeck (Assistant Director and Manuscript Archivist), Amanda Smith (Head Film and Video Archivist), Ben Pettis (Data Curation and Scripting Project Assistant), and Lesley Stevenson (Data Curation and Scripting Project Assistant). The project advisory board will consist of Ryan Cordell, Anna Everett, Kathryn Fuller-Seely, Paul Moore, and Lauren Tilton.
Postings with interesting findings and visualizations from the research project are expected to be released throughout 2026 on the WCFTR and MHDL websites. We are excited to see the upcoming findings Project Ballyhoo provides for researchers in film, media, journalism, history, and beyond.
The official NEH Press Release for their 2025 grant awards can be accessed here.