Part I
1. Others is a poetry magazine, so I imagine that words are even more important (or loaded) than they might be in a prose publication. The five most frequent words used in the magazine are “old,” “night,” “little,” and “love,” and “eyes.” The three words with the most notable peak are “new,” “shall,” and “things.” Among the most distinctive words were “miggles” (?), “revenge,” and “river.” Based on the data I have just mentioned, I can likely assume that the magazine uses metaphors and description to convey its message.
2. The longest issue is Vol 5 Issue 6, and the shortest is Vol 3 Issue 6. Supposedly, the shortest issue has the highest vocabulary density. However, that really does not make sense based on the issues I have looked at. Ultimately, the spectrum demonstrates to me that all issues of Others’ publication are relatively short.
3. Based on the Word trends graph created by the data, it is interesting that between the words “old” and “new” the word “old” is the word to experience two medium level inclines and two sharp inclines in usage. The word “new” does indicate miniscule dips and increases, but generally, its usage does not vary so drastically.
1. In The Crisis magazine, the most frequently used words are “colored,” “negro,” “new,” “white,” and “school.” Distinctive words from various issues are most commonly “negro,” and “colored.” Other distinctive words are of interest as well, such as “woman,” “law,” “social,” and “work.” From this information, I think it would be safe to assume that readers of these publications (and the public in general) closely associate collective identity by skin color, and not necessarily ethnicity.
2. This archive has 148 documents in it, making it a rather large collection to analyze. The longest The longest publication is from Volume 18 Issue 2, and the shortest publication is from Vol 14 Issue 3. Once again, the issue with the highest vocabulary density is from the shortest publication in the archive. I think the size of the shortest issue of The Crisis (52 pages) indicates that the magazine had an extremely resourceful and perhaps better trained staff than other publications. Fifty-two pages of information is still a significant amount to produce in a month’s time.
3. I found it more difficult to interpret the graphs I created from various tag-cloud words. There is so much more information represented by The Crisis graph, so I’ve had a harder time finding significant trends or irregularities. I do think there might be something interesting to investigate about in the following graph, however. I input the words “time” and “work” and found that for the most part, the word “work” takes precedent within The Crisis. However, there are two issues (particularly) in which this is not the case. I’m curious whether further investigation of the data might indicate some reason as to why “time” is more interesting or important to the reader than “work.”
Based on the data gathered from both of my sources it is obvious that both publications are concerned with very different things. Whereas The Crisis indicates the importance of issues, Others seems to concern itself more with the way in which issues are recounted. Although Others uses the word “old” more often than the word “new,” The Crisis seems to be more concerned with immediate words, (like “negro,” “school,” etc).
Part II
When I click on the link to view Voyant for the entire corpus, I am not shown a tag-cloud, however, I do see statistics displayed, such as the following:
1. The word patterns throughout the corpus look very much like the word patterns I found in The Crisis. For instance, the most frequently used words were “new,” “colored,” “negro,” “man,” and “men,” respectively. In the case of the first magazine I researched (Others), the corpus indicates a difference in the frequency of the use of the word “new” (as “new” was not used so much as was the word “old”).
2. The longest document in the corpus actually comes from Blast, however, the the shortest document in the corpus comes from Others (which I researched during Part I of the lab). The document with the highest vocabulary density is from the same issue of Others. I do not recall the word “year” showing a notable peak in frequency during the first part of the lab, so its usage may have come primarily from a publication I have yet to research. It does appear as though researching The Crisis gave me a good idea of what the corpus as a whole might contain.
3. It does seem as though The Crisis steers our study of the corpus as a whole, mainly because it composes the largest of all of the collections. The Crisis seems to be a publication that is not necessarily modernist; rather, it was merely produced during the modernist era, so The Crisis might pervert a researchers understanding of general trends in modernist literature. A question I have is why The Crisis is considered a modernist journal. Nevertheless, a question I have that is based on the data is whether the number of times the term “man” is used (when “woman” is not) indicates that modern publications were not as gender-progressive as I would have suspected. Of course, I remember our discussion of the romantic era’s obsession with the word “reason,” so I know that my question might be prove to be inadequate.
However, the usage of “men” is much greater than the usage of “people,” and “people is much more common that the usage of the word“woman.” This doesn’t seem avant-garde to me.