This blog posts dives deeper into the collection of articles from “The Crisis”, a collection of articles illustrating the real-life troubles and difficulties that African Americans lived through in the early 1900’s.
For this blog, we look at a different data visualization site called Flourish. Flourish is a network graphing tool that takes data sets and turns them into visualizations that are pleasing to the eye and can provide many different ways of analyzing large amounts of data. This is one of the easiest ways to answer the overarching question provided for this blog post:
Question: Using Flourish, which of the following authors had the most connections while writing in “The Crisis”: Adams, Fauset, Johnson, or Du Bois?
Figure 1: An analysis of all authors
The above Flourish graph shows the connections between every author within “The Crisis” and how each one has a relationship with each other given certain similar topics and mentions as well as written relationships. The larger the dot, the more this author has written throughout the 10-20 years of this articles existence. Each different colored dot represents a different aspect of “The Crisis”, in which the author focused on that kind of information the most during his writings. The key can be found at the top left portion of each figure; Blue represents letters that the author collected and documented, yellow as images, green as articles, purple as fiction, light blue as poetry, dark blue as drama, and finally dark green as music. Even before analyzing more information about the certain authors, I think it is safe to conclude that images and articles were the most prominently used genre for each author, and that could relate to the author that wrote within the genre.
Figure 2: An analysis of John Adams
John Henry Adams mainly wrote in the images genre. He has mainly connections in articles, but also several in poetry and fiction. However, each fiction bubble is smaller than the rest, so it can be inferred that this genre had the least amount of connections to Adams.
Figure 3: An analysis of Jessie Fauset
Jessie Fauset has a significantly greater number of connections than previously spoken Adams. His focus was on articles, in which he has primarily other article connections, as well as larger poetry sections and a small portion of fictional connections. His bubble has an extremely similar size as Adams’ image bubble and they have the same types of connections, so it is interesting to note that the two different genres can have completely different amounts of connections even though they wrote in “The Crisis” for the same amount of time.
Figure 4: An analysis of George Douglass Johnson
George Douglass Johnson focused his work on poetry, which, in previous figures, can be noted as one of the lesser known connections within these articles. However, Johnson still has a numerous amount of connections with the same genres as the previous figures. Even more interesting, his bubble seems to be smaller than the previous two figures, meaning he didn’t write for as long as the other writers. How come quick poetry has such a greater impact on connections and genres than longer works of articles and imagery?
Figure 5: An analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois
Finally, W.E.B. Du Bois is an obvious larger known author throughout “The Crisis”. Before doing any investigating with Flourish in its data sets, we talked about Du Bois more than any other author within these articles. While doing initial research on “The Crisis” at the beginning of the semester, I noticed the Du Bois was a common name in most pages I’ve read. When doing further research with The Voyant tools, I found myself look at Du Bois’ works a lot more than others so I could easily make connections to specific parts of the articles. Du Bois has a similar shaped bubble as the first two individual author figures, which makes sense as he likely wrote for the longest as well as others, and would beat out the connections from smaller poetry authors like Johnson. He has an exuberant amount of connections, mainly towards other article-based authors. Du Bois even has more connections to genres not previously stated in other figures, such as letters.
All in all, Flourish is a great tool to provide connections between authors and their genres, as well as any other specific connections between multiple data points.
I was able to answer my initial question of analyzing four prominent authors: Du Bois had the most connections as an article writer, followed by Fauset, Johnson, and Adams.
Although this question was pretty well answered through easy searches and data analyzation, it also provided even more questions that can be asked in future blog posts. For example, how does the genre impact on well these connections can be made? It seemed as though the more you wrote, the more widely you were known, yet Johnson was a poetry writer and had more connections than Adams, but didn’t write for nearly as long as he did. So what is the true relationship between the length of writing and genres? I can go on with multiple more particular questions, but I am satisfied that my original question was answered easily through analyzing with Flourish.