Midterm Exam Fall 2022

Introduction:

In my mid-term project I wanted to explore how frequently Mark Twain, in his speeches, used the words: Women, Men and Children. Because Mark Twain was a male writer of the late 19th century I expected the number of times the word men was used was much greater than women. Additionally, I predicted that because women during the late 19th century were generally restricted to the Domestic Sphere in writing children and women would group together more.

Sources:

For this project I used an ebook file of Mark Twain’s speeches. The ebook itself comes from Project Gutenburg. Although, I did not choose Mark Twain’s speeches (the file was given in the midterm prompt) I do think that it is representative of writing from this time period and serves to help answer the larger question of how frequently do women and children near each other in texts relative to men.

Processes:

In order to examine the word frequencies I used Voyant as my tool of choice. The first step in the process was uploading Mark Twain’s works as a corpus. Next, I set Voyant was great for the job because I was able to use their trends tool. I chose to have 29 document segments because it was a number where you could see the distribution across the corpus but it was not too tight or spread out.

I then utilized the filter function for the word frequency tool. I decided to create a graph by the following three words: women, men and children. The graph image below is the raw frequency of each term. Below that is an embedded version of the model. You can enter other terms to overlay over the original graph to see how they compare.

Static Version:

Interactive Version:

Presentation:

Creating this website as a subdomain was unintuitive. I struggled with figuring out that I needed to download Word-Press for my new subdomain. Once I got that figured out, the processes was very familiar. I chose a black and white theme for the website because it seemed Mark Twain and his works better stylistically.

Significance:

Exploring gendered word distribution highlights the fact that Mark Twain wrote more about men than women and children in his famous speeches. Additionally, it shows that to a certain degree women and children are lumped near each other in his speeches. This shows that one some level women and children are thought of as one group in writing and that men are in a different group.

While project functions is a surface level textual analysis. There is a lot of potential for further textual analysis for how different genders are written about. I think it would be very interesting to compare different works from male and female authors. How would the gender distribution for older books in comparison to newer ones? Overtime how has literature changed? Do we still see these groupings in modern novels today? All these questions can be answered in a deeper dive into textual analysis using tools like Voyant.