30 Years of Lesbian Life in Curve Magazine

About the Data

My dataset is based on 4,127 articles from Deneuve, later renamed Curve Magazine from 1991 through 2011. The articles are available on the Gale Digital Scholar Lab database, which. processed them through optical character recognition, but were originally scanned by the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives. Within this larger dataset, I created several sub-data sets, including 861 articles with correct dates from 1991-2001 I used to create a topic model, and 186 letters to the editor, personals, and advice columns I used to create a map and sentiment analysis. I was able to use the many algorithms contained in the Gale Digital Scholar database to accomplish tasks like creating topic models with the MALLET API and sentiment analysis using the AFINN lexicon. I used Tableau for the stacked bar chart, pie chart, and maps, and the Gale bar chart and sentiment analysis scatter plot use highcharts.com. I used open refine and easy csv for data cleaning.

In the first instance turning the data output into a usable dataset required finding articles with correct dates and modifying dates, and also transposing the data from columns for each word into columns for each topic, then matching article IDs to titles. I minimized overlap to limit the number of topics and make sense of change over time by not matching articles to words that appeared in almost every topic, such as lesbian and women. These words appear in the original topic comparison.
 The six original topics were Relationships, Travel, Music, Writers, Film and TV, and Civil Rights. I added additional combination topics below:

Relationships and Travel
International LGBT rights: Civil Rights + Travel
Lesbians in Entertainment: Music + Film and TV
Lesbian Music: Music + Relationships
Music Festivals: Music + Travel
Lesbian Rights: Civil rights + Relationships
Lesbian Writers: Writers + Relationships
Activist Lesbian Writers: Writers + Civil Rights + Relationships

I also added one category I noticed had distinct words, bodies and health. Words like “cancer,” “health”, and even gynecologist (in a title, not the topic model) seemed distinct from overall LGBT civil rights issues like marriage equality or child adoption.

I created the map by using the Gale named entity recognition tool, which uses the spaCy Annotation NER, which uses the Ontocorpus 5 list of entity categories. Through the geo-political entity category, I was able to find locations in open refine, and then geocode the locations using the https://www.geocod.io/ spreadsheet upload and Google Maps for international ones. 

Scalar builds timelines based on the timeline.js framework. When users upload media or create pages as metadata records with dates, they can be added into the timeline through tags.

Thank you Syann Lunsford, Will, Jake Tompkins, and Miriam Posner for help with dealing with this data!

Dataset: Deneuve: The Lesbian Magazine and Curve Magazine, Vol. 1- Vol. 21, 1991-2011, Archives of Sexuality and Gender

Other Sources:

Ahead of the Curve. “About.” Accessed February 28, 2021. https://curvemagmovie.com/about/.
Baker, Paul, and Erez Levon. “Picking the Right Cherries? A Comparison of Corpus-Based and Qualitative Analyses of News Articles about Masculinity.” Discourse & Communication 9, no. 2 (April 1, 2015): 221–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481314568542.
Bianco, Marcie. “This Is What 25 Years Of Lesbian Culture In Print Looks Like.” BuzzFeed. Accessed December 22, 2020. https://www.buzzfeed.com/marcieb4f1ba695b/25-years-of-lesbian-culture-curve-magazine.
Bracewell, Lorna Norman. “Beyond Barnard: Liberalism, Antipornography Feminism, and the Sex Wars.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (September 2016): 23–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/686752. 
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2003.
David Boeyr. “Keeping a Straight Face.” Salon, October 1, 1996. https://www.salon.com/1996/10/01/media961001/.
“Digital Scholar Lab - Help Center Named Entity Recognition.” Accessed March 10, 2021. https://go.gale.com/ps/helpCenter?userGroupName=uclosangeles&inPS=true&nspage=true&prodId=DSLAB&docId=JHAUCA114053164.
“Digital Scholar Lab - Help Center Sentiment Analysis.” Accessed March 10, 2021. https://go.gale.com/ps/helpCenter?userGroupName=uclosangeles&inPS=true&nspage=true&prodId=DSLAB&docId=UEVEZF894752122.
“Digital Scholar Lab - Help Center Topic Modeling.” Accessed March 10, 2021. https://go.gale.com/ps/helpCenter?userGroupName=uclosangeles&inPS=true&nspage=true&prodId=DSLAB&docId=KLCXAP370866047.
Dunlap, David W. “For Lesbian Magazine, a Question of Image (Published 1996).” The New York Times, January 8, 1996, sec. Business. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/business/for-lesbian-magazine-a-question-of-image.html.
Franco Stevens. Brooke Means Business: Franco Stevens, Founder and Publisher of Curve Magazine | Autostraddle. Interview by Brooke Levin, March 28, 2010. Autostraddle. https://www.autostraddle.com/brooke-means-business-2-39191/.
Gonsoulin, Margaret E. “Liberated and Inclusive? An Analysis of Self-Representation in a Popular Lesbian Magazine.” Journal of Homosexuality 57, no. 9 (September 30, 2010): 1158–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2010.508327.
Groeneveld, Elizabeth. “Letters to the Editor as ‘Archives of Feeling’: On Our Backs Magazine and the Sex Wars.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 28, no. 2 (2018): 153–67.
Holt, Patricia. “A Bookstore Clerk’s Big Idea.” SFGATE, May 5, 1996. https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/A-Bookstore-Clerk-s-Big-Idea-2982978.php.
Hurbanis, Audrey Nowakowski, Jack. “Ahead Of The Curve: How The World’s Most Successful Lesbian Magazine Created Positive Visibility.” WUVM. Accessed March 1, 2021. https://www.wuwm.com/post/ahead-curve-how-worlds-most-successful-lesbian-magazine-created-positive-visibility.
Rand, Erin J. “An Appetite for Activism: The Lesbian Avengers and the Queer Politics of Visibility.” Women’s Studies in Communication 36, no. 2 (June 2013): 121–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2013.794754.
———. Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance. University of Alabama Press, 2014.
Schroeder, Stephanie. “A Curve in the Road for Curve Magazine.” GO Magazine, October 12, 2010. http://gomag.com/article/stephanie_schroeder/.
 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html.
Sebastian, Teeja Mary. Sentiment Analysis: A Perspective on Its Past, Present and Future, n.d.
Stevens, Franco. “New Dyke in Town: The Rapid Rise of Denueve.” In Happy Endings : Lesbian Writers Talk about Their Lives and Work. Tallahassee, Fla. : Naiad Press, 1993. http://archive.org/details/happyendingslesb00bran.
Whitt, Jan. “A ‘Labor from the Heart’: Lesbian Magazines from 1947-1994.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 1–2 (January 2001): 229–51. https://doi.org/10.1300/J155v05n01_15.
 

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