Scalar
Two of the driving forces behind the structural aspects of the project are Hélène Cixous' essay "Le Rire de la Méduse" [The Laugh of the Medusa] and Luce Irigaray's book Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas Un [This Sex Which is Not one], published in 1975 and 1974 respectively, and two of the essential writings of the post-structuralist feminism of the second wave. Both of these writers criticized the implicit phallogocentrism embedded in language and discursive structure, and called for its dismantling in order to free women to speak as themselves, through connections rather than confined to expressing themselves in the linear, logical structure of phallogocentric discourse. This meant that the form in which I presented my content had to be understood in a different context. In using Scalar, I was able to construct a narrative outside of these confines for the first time. As a result, the way I interacted with and presented my data required a different approach–I had to think about how each paragraph, page and section connected to one another. Being able to embed media and infographics into Scalar, such as those offered by Voyant, also created a greater sense of subjective involvement than a static text document. It allowed the readership to make their own searches within the corpora, interacting with the data, and crossing the barrier between the fixed research narrative in which I employed the data, and their own subjective interests.
To maintain the aesthetic appeal of the path visualization on the home page, I connected some pages through hyperlinks found in the text rather than connecting them through paths from one to the other. An example of this can be found anytime I mention decades different from the ones the specific New York Times page is dealing with, for example 1940-1959 is a hyperlink on the 2000-2016 page, which the reader may click if they wish to look back on earlier linguistic data to make comparisons.
I also learned html to change font colour and style, format text placement, and insert hyperlinks to webpages where applicable. Most of this was accomplished thanks to Google, but the website http://www.w3schools.com/ was very helpful for looking into things more deeply, or getting ideas about other possible code manipulations.
To read about my conclusions and access my bibliographies, click here.