Using Digital Media to Analyze the Evolution of Feminist Discourse

The New York Times

To track the evolution of language used when discussing issues related to Women and Girls in the media, I accessed 80 articles published by The New York Times (NYT) between 1940 and 2016. This page presents a data visualization of the entirety of the corpora showing which terms have been used most frequently between these years, and how the frequency has changed over time. 

Below you will find an interactive graphic generated by Voyant which provides a visual analysis of linguistic trends using a corpus composed of 80 articles from The New York Times relating to "Women and Girls" between the years 1940 and 2016. While the data visualization presented provides interesting information, it also evokes further questions pertaining to cultural understandings of Women's issues and interests. 

The following pages contain Voyant analyses for articles split into groupings of twenty years (scores) for the purpose of presenting shifts in media language with relation to the core issues of the various feminist waves. They are accompanied by points of interest that I have personally noted in my research, as well as images and short videoclips which relate to different feminist theorists and movements of the era to provide context to possible influences.

I urge you to interact with the embedded graphics, and to look up any terminology that interests you, exploring the corpora in which ever format suits you best. 

Note: Don’t be fooled by the graph, pay attention to how the y axis labelled “Raw Frequencies” changes by clicking on individual terms in the word cloud to better show results to scale

All of the data presented has come from either The New York Times website,or ProQuest Historical Newspapers accessed through the University of Guelph. 

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page references: