For this project, I used Voyant Tools to analyze the play entitled Votes for Women by Elizabeth Robins. This play, originally published in 1907 was a feminist piece in support of the suffrage movement. Within this class, I wanted to see how effectively I could analyze a text using data visualization. For this play specifically, I wanted to see how the data represented some of the feminist themes presented within the novel. Particularly, I was curious as to how prevalent women are within the text and how well the text does at centering female narratives in comparison to male narratives. In order to do this, I uploaded the play into Voyant Tools and selected the names and titles of both male and female characters. What I found was that men are much less prevalent throughout the text in comparison to the female characters. Word clusters are a great way to visualize the frequency of words in a text overall. The word cluster for this data can be seen above or here. As seen in the word cluster, the word “women” is a bit more prevalent in the text than “men”, as “women” shows up 156 times in the text whereas “men” is only reported 103 times in the text. Female characters such as Jean also seem to appear more often in the text. Jean appears 303 times within the text, while her husband, Stonor, appears only 269 times. Word clusters are helpful for analyzing texts overall, but don’t show different trends within a text. For instance, with this visualization, it is impossible to tell how often female characters appear at different points in the text. Maybe, for instance, Jean appears many times in the beginning of the play but not at all towards the end. For more specific data, I used the line chart to track the prevalence of the different characters.
From this graph, it becomes quite clear that there are major fluctuations in the frequency of each of these characters. For instance, the dark blue trend line represents the frequency of the word “women” which starts off quite prevalent and becomes significantly less frequent by the end of the text. The presence of men seems to increase by the end of the play, and male characters such as Stonor increase in frequency and surpass women and female characters such as Jean. This line chart is helpful in understanding trends throughout the play rather than overall.
Conclusions
As an English major, it was definitely interesting to try and analyze a text using data rather than a closer reading. I was skeptical, and still am, that this form of analysis could replace a close reading analysis, but I am quite convinced that the two could complement each other. The trends that data visualization was able to show are definitely not something that I could find out from a close reading of the play. I also have a very elementary understanding of this technology, and I am sure that someone who knows how to use Voyant tools better than I do could reveal much more about the text than I was able to. I wouldn’t feel comfortable stating whether or not the text is feminist just simply through the frequency at which men and women appear within the play, but I am quite intrigued by the idea of exploring themes within texts through data analysis.
Trouble in Paradise
There were many hardships when doing this midterm project. The most significant of which, I must admit, would be trying to set up my own subdomain. What I was hoping to do was have my subdomain redirect to this page. This, unfortunately, did not happen, as every time I would link this webpage and try to get it to redirect, it would say, much to my dismay and frustration, “This site cannot be reached”. This lasted for about two hours before I let my frustrations overcome me. I am still not quite sure how to fix this. Other than that, I am proud of my work.
