Media History Digital Library

The Media History Digital Library (MHDL) is a non-profit, open access digital archive founded by David Pierce[1] and directed by Eric Hoyt that compiles books, magazines, and other print materials related to the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound and makes these materials accessible online for free.

[2][3] Projects of the Media History Digital Library include its search engine Lantern[4] and its data visualization platform Arclight.

[3][6][7] In 2011, Pierce and fellow film history scholar Eric Hoyt built a website to expand access to the more than 200,000 pages of movie magazines they had digitized, which would be hosted on the Internet Archive.

[11][14] Source:[10] Documents in the MHDL collections include issues from both prominent and obscure magazines and trade papers that are now out of copyright and therefore in the public domain.

[21] Primarily intended for scholars of the digital humanities and film history, Arclight searches the text of all pages in MHDL collections to retrieve and visualize data about keywords and trends within a given timeframe.

[22][23] The project was funded by a "Digging into Data" grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services in the United States and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.

[23] The project's co-creators, Eric Hoyt and Charles R. Acland, published an edited collection, The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities outlining the method, design, and ways of using the platform.

[25] The MHDL curates and makes freely available lesson plans, toolkits, and assignments both for instructors looking to incorporate its collections into their classrooms and for students of all levels.