Journal of Digital History (@jdighist.bsky.social)

Methodology-focused: How can historians work with thousands of hours of sound? This article introduces segmentation & dimensionality reduction methods for large-scale radio archives, showing how computational analysis reveals hidden structures in public service broadcasting

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Navigating the Radio Archive: Segmentation and analysis of Swedish broadcasting data This work aims to explore the relationship between sound archives and historiography, focusing on the Swedish case of mass media archiving from the 1980s. The study investigates the sonic content of public service radio changes during the introduction of commercial broadcasting, using computational methods. In the analysis, two of the most popular public service broadcasting channels, P1 and P3 are compared. By analysing 1,600 hours of radio data, the paper reveals a shift in the number of detected occurrences, with varying sonic sequences that reflect the overall structure of the broadcast. Although the sample sizes are small, the findings show a correlation between object detection and dimension reduction, suggesting and increasing attention to content variation. The paper contributes to the understanding of historical radio data, offering pre-processing and segmentation methods for working with cultural audio data. It also emphasizes the methodological implications of combining dimensionality reduction and object classification approaches, demonstrating the value of using pretrained and untrained algorithms together for a comprehensive understanding of the local and fine-grained aspects of audio data. The necessity of such an approach springs from the oceanic extent of content in the radio archive. Thus, the article suggests new ways to navigate the radio archive https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/article/6EWgjJtoiW6R