For this project, I worked exclusively with the index that takes up pages 196 to 205 of Ann Tracy's text, The Gothic Novel 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs.

I began by typing into a spreadsheet the author, author gender, title, and publication date of each of the 208 works she indexes, double-checking the bibliographic information against the more recent Oxford bibliography of The English Novel 1770-1829, edited by Peter Garside and James Raven.

I then created a column for each motif in the index which had at least twenty books associated with it. I worked my way through the motifs in no particular order, typing (usually) a "1" at each intersection of motif-column and book-row that corresponded to an entry in the index.

I created a new sheet in the Excel file for each motif, and used Excel pivot tables to get counts of how many times each motif appears in books by men versus women. After weighting the resulting percentages, I created the graphs in Excel.

A typical case-- minus the weighting of percentages and final aesthetic decisions-- is exemplified in this video.

For further details of, and justifications for, more specific methodological decisions, see:

1. Tracy and Selection Methods
2. Categorization of Motifs
3. Determining Author Gender
4. Publication Dates
5. Weighting of Percentages
6. Graph Creation