Blog Post #3- Exploring Text Visualization Tools

People kept dying in February!

One of them was artist Nancy Holt, and after reading about her life/death in the Times, it got me wondering about the language of obituaries. So for my blog post #3, I compared a dozen women’s and men’s obituaries in the NY Times, using Wordle and Voyant- which was much more interesting!

First the issues- it’s hard to compare people- it’s subjective, arbitrary- so I tried to find pairs that would be the most like comparing apples to apples. 

Like: same profession, similar length of life, comparable volume of output/influence, similar kinds of work, similar institutional/popular recognition, generally recognized on an equal level and similar length of obituary. I also tried to get relatively recent obituaries- except for Georgia O’Keeffe (1986) and Clement Greenberg (1994)- most (the other 10) are from the past decade.

I KNOW, that’s pretty shaky ground to start on-but I was having fun with the idea and wanted to use the tools to see what I could see in the texts.

First I did them one at a time- one man, one woman- and these were the pairing categories:

Earthwork/Land Art artists: Nancy Holt and Walter De Maria

Big famous artists whose work appears on mugs and totebags:  Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Rauschenberg

Big famous artists who aren’t average kitchen table names: Louise Bourgeois and Cy Twombly

Big famous people you read in art theory class: Susan Sontag and Stuart Hall

Big famous critics: Ada Huxtable and Clement Greenberg,

Big famous Nobel Prize winning writers: Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney. (Here I wanted to do poet vs poet –(Wislawa Szymborska) but thought maybe it’s better to compare English language literature since it’s an English Language newspaper??)

These are the results from a few individual comparisons in Wordle: 

Nancy Holt and Walter De Maria:

Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney: 

Susan Sontag and Stuart Hall:

Then I did them all together:

Women: Doris Lessing, Ada Louise Huxtable, Nancy Holt, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keefe, Susan Sontag

Men: Seamus Heaney, Clement Greenberg, Walter De Maria,  Cy Twombly,  Robert Rauschenberg, Stuart Hall

I also put them in Voyant tools because I wanted to compare how many action words/verbs were in the pairings, but found Voyant hard to use in that respect. I was able to get word counts for each word, but found it hard to select a grouping of words (like “made, wrote, said” all together) because the texts were long and the panel called Frequencies Word Corpus seems to only allow one page at a time (?)

So I tried it a little bit differently. I put in the words “work” and “works” for a few one on one comparisons. Here are the results.

The word work(s) in obituaries of Nancy Holt and Walter DeMaria- her obit is shorter, but more mentions of work/works- but if you count earthworks, he has a few more.

The word work(s) in obituaries of Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney- her obit is longer, but with fewer mentions of work.

Then, there was this- a big difference in occurance of the word work(s) in obituaries of Louise Bourgeois and Cy Twombly: 

 

Next, I put all the Women’s obituaries together and all the Men’s obituaries together, creating a larger corpus, and did the same search- there was a noticeable difference, even though the total word counts were relatively similar. 
Women Total word count: 10,228; work(s) mentioned:34 
Men Total word count: 10,405; work(s) mentioned: 57

I think what I learned here is that the corpus has to be big to really see patterns evolve. It would be great to do this on a really large scale, to see if the same patterns would get larger. (Reinforces the Moretti article.)

In terms of students doing this: This was fun to do, there’s a visual pleasure right away with Wordle, but to get a little deeper, with Voyant, took time and effort and also a deep curiosity on my part. I think you have dedicate time to learn how to use the tools and start out with a good question- a question that leads to more questions. I think students would have to use material they are deeply interested in to start the process of a committed exploration- and then see all the possibilities of looking at the data from different angles.

PS: I also tried Docuburst, but I’m not exactly sure how to read these results accurately.