As CNN relies more and more heavily on interviewing people at home during the Covid-19 crisis, imagery of bookcases are soaring as people create a "scholarly" backdrop for their home video shoots. That bookcases would become such a popular backdrop reminds us of their powerful association with expertise, knowledge and scientific and scholarly authority.
The timeline below shows "bookcase" imagery as detected by Google's Cloud Video AI API from CNN Jan. 25 to present using data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive:
An even more striking graph is that of "author" which looks for imagery of solitary individuals posed in front of a wall of books, as was typically used in pre-Covid-19 times by authors discussing their latest book.
