Using Digital Media to Analyze the Evolution of Feminist Discourse

Methodology

For the portion of my project dealing with the evolution of language, I wanted to use textual data that would have a strong interaction with the public in North America. Assuming members of the public interact with daily newspaper articles (in print or online) more often than books, I chose to use one such publication as my source of data. The New York Times is arguably one of the most widely read periodicals in North America (though sources contest exactly how widely), therefore it proposes a strong influence on the knowledge and lexicon of its readership. This paired with the fact that the New York Times website provided the option of searching through articles pertaining specifically to the topic “Women and Girls” made it an effective source of data for my proposed goals. Articles accessible under this topic dated back to 1964, with one article from 1944. There was, however, a massive gap of data between 1964 and 1996. Furthermore, while the grouping of articles under the topic of “Women and Girls” seemed advantageous to my purposes, the list could only be viewed in order of most recent publication to oldest, or vice-versa. Attempting to search for specific years or dates generally did not present articles published within the desired time period, but rather yielded articles that discussed the dates being searched.
 
I then turned to ProQuest historical newspapers, accessed through the University of Guelph Library website, where an advanced search using the terms “woman,” “women,” and “New York Times,” and limiting the results to full text, provided me with pdfs of articles dating back to 1940. Setting specific date ranges through decades at a time (1940-1949, 1950-1959, etc.) allowed me to scour through articles, choosing those of appropriate length and topic, and selecting a number from each decade to experiment with in Voyant.
 
Thus I composed my corpus from a series of news stories, opinion pieces, and a few reviews of other published works. While I had at first hoped to exclude anything outside the realm of news, I concluded that other forms of journalism were not of any less value than “objective” news stories, and in fact provided some writing that was more openly subjective and, perhaps more relevant to feminist structures in defying phallogocentrism’s preoccupation with objective discourse.

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