100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

Jason Palmeri / Ben McCorkle

Visualizing the Archive

WORD FREQUENCIES BY DECADE.

While all the graphs we've shown so far have visualized data generated through our own process of human reading and coding, we turn now to presenting graphs that result from machine reading of the whole corpus using the quantitative textual analysis tool, Voyant. As we present video screencast discussions of the word frequency visualizations, we find that they confirm much of what we noticed through human coding, while also calling our attention to some other aspects of the corpus that our own very human eyes had overlooked

We present first a series of word clouds that visualize the 45 most frequent words in our entire corpus for each decade (excluding overly common words). In the video screencast below, we have a conversation about some of the trends we noted, how particular words rose and fell in prominence over the decades. That said, we discuss only a few of the many intriguing word frequency trends one might notice; as a result, we encourage you to play with word cloud slideshow beneath the video and see how they might inspire you to ask questions that we did not imagine.


Word Clouds by Decade
Word Cloud 1912 to 1929
1912 to 1929
Word Cloud 1930 to 1939
1930s
Word Cloud 1940 to 1949
1940s
Word Cloud 1950 to 1959
1950s
Word Cloud 1960 to 1969
1960s
Word Cloud 1970 to 1979
1970s
Word Cloud 1980 to 1989
1980s
Word Cloud 1990 to 1999
1990s
Word Cloud 2000 to 2012
2000 to 2012
Word Cloud 1912  to 2012
All Years: 1912 to 2012


While we find the word clouds to be particularly generative, it's difficult when viewing them to keep track of how individual words rise and fall over time since they are all smooshed together in the same cloud. Taking inspiration from the Google Ngram Viewer, we have built an interactive line graph visualization that enables users to selectively compare the frequency of two or more terms across the decades; all of the terms for this n-gram viewer appeared in the top 100 most frequent in our corpus (again, excluding overly common words); we selected which terms to include based on our subjective sense of what might be the most intriguing for our users to compare. Once again, we provide a video tour in which discuss some of the term comparisons that we found most meaningful, but we also encourage you to play with the n-gram viewer yourself and let us know what you notice.


N-Grams by Decade

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