Our data relies heavily on text. We chose to look at text from Dietrich’s films, cabarets, and memoir in order to better understand Dietrich’s place in various realms she occupied throughout her career. Text helped us understand the role of gender in Dietrich’s life, by illustrating communication patterns: a semantic focus on men, accompanied by lust after women (as beings subservient to men). Also, by looking at images of Dietrich, as well as data about her collaborations, we were able to visualize the spaces she occupied in the world: primarily a liminal space between object and agent. 

The film transcripts from our text analysis were largely pulled from the online database Scripts.com. Films that were unavailable there were pulled from SubsLikeScript.com. PDFs were downloaded and cleaned of extraneous information like page numbers before being put into Voyant. These transcripts were used in lieu of screenplays due to the general lack of these older film screenplays readily available online. Although screenplays could have provided even more context and information to analyze, the transcripts still provided a plethora of dialogue that reveal interesting trends that could provide context for even closer research in the future.

The songs from our text analysis were pulled from both the book Marlene Dietrich: The Songbook and the album The Essential Marlene Dietrich. Lyrics from the songbook were transcribed into individual word documents. Lyrics from the album were sourced from online resources, primarily Genius.com. However, several songs were only available in German so Google Translate was used to translate them into English. Some songs were also translated through crowdsourced websites like LyricsTranslate.com when available from native German speakers.

Marlene Dietrich’s memoir was pulled from a Kindle version of the book checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library. The text was copied into a word document in order to use it within Voyant. These three sources were divided into separate datasets in order to analyze Dietrich’s career at different stages of her life. 

For the network analyses, all data was compiled from IMDb. We generated the node and edge tables based on IMDb credits per Dietrich film. For each film, the data included information about 10 top contributor’s roles (director, composer, producer, actor, etc.). Gender data was generated by using pronouns listed on IMDb. Since these genders are assumed, there may be some inaccuracies in terms of how some nodes are identified. We also used the IMDb data as a basis for the StoryMap to look at where Dietrich’s collaborations occurred, on which films, and with whom. The dataset is available here. 

Synopses and plot summaries for Josef von Sternberg’s films were also found on IMDb. These were cleaned to remove mentions of character names. IMDb data for the network analysis was cleaned to remove any films where Dietrich’s credit was “archival footage,” since she would not have been working with the director, producer, etc. in those films, but simply mentioned and shown enough to warrant crediting. 

Looking at gender, we chose to restrict our data to text because we felt it would be able to provide us with other information and context beyond simple gender dichotomies, like screen time per gender, for example. We were interested in exploring the nuances of gender representations in film, song, and identity presentation. As gender relates to collaboration, we were curious to see if there were any women Dietrich worked with consistently.

Though our analysis is thorough when it comes to related texts and relationships, it fails to capture other possibly significant people and places in Dietrich’s life. We did not analyze her relationships with other composers and songwriters for her long singing career, nor did we closely look at her USO tour, which launched her even further into the American spotlight. Her relationship with her own history as a German emigré is not the main focus of our analysis, but surely does inform the ways in which she navigated her presence, from gender presentation to her film career.