From Photoplays to Movies: A Distant Reading of Cinema's Eventual Legitimation from Below

ABSTRACT:This paper posits that the two divergent strategies aiming to legitimize cinema in the transitional and early classical eras—imitation of the established arts, and emphasis on the popular nature and specificity of the new media—can be correlated to different sets of words and expressions used to label moving pictures. It then proceeds to track the fate of these connoted words and expressions through the distant reading of the vast corpuses of digitized historical publications explored by Project Arclight and the Google Books Ngram Viewer. The findings foreground the role played by newspapermen in the institutionalization of cinema.