How do word trends influence the material?

Research question: In the Crisis Magazine, how do trends in word count, vocabulary and frequency of words change over the course of the various publications and what meaning can we deduce from this? We will also take a look at word clouds and charts to make various inferences. This is largely speculation, however it demonstrates how using a simple software program such as Voyant can show us so much without even reading the entire source material. If you truly want to understand what “The Crisis” is saying you either have to get a summary from someone who read it or read it yourself. For this article I want you to pretend you have no idea what the Crisis magazine is, you have never heard of it and you barely know any American history. We will see what a rookie American can find out assuming they can read english well. I will try to work with this from a similar perspective, so we can see what I myself can deduce from working with this Voyant program for the first time.

I will analyze multiple editions of the crisis magazine, making sure to jump ahead in time and space out which editions I review-so as not to review back to back editions. The point of this is to see how the magazine has changed in its language usage, vocabulary and so on. This is important as there may be a trend in the length and word complexity of the magazine.

We begin with the first edition, Vol 1. No 1. With just over 13,000 words, a vocabulary density of 0.254, and the most common words: “Colored”, “negro”, and “new” respectively. Right off the bat this may not tell us a lot, but you may be surprised. Firstly, we know that this is a relatively long first magazine article (13,000 word essay is long trust me). They are talking a lot about black people. New York is mentioned a lot, meaning this article could have strong  relevance to this location. Some less frequently used words are “School,” “Chicago,” and “states.” From this we can see this is referring to the United States, or at least has some relevance to it. We also see “Washington” and “Baltimore” used a few times, now we can be certain they are indeed talking about the United States. 

Now let’s look at the next two editions: Vol. 4 No. 6 and Vol. 11. No. 5. There is a very interesting phenomenon, the word count has gone up substantially in both of these, going from 26,129 words to 34,822 respectively. This says that either the depth of information of what the articles are saying has been greatly increased, or there are simply more sections to look at. The budget could have increased and would allow for more writing? The vocabulary density has only gone down in the respective editions, this could be because there are simply more words (thereby having more repeated words). It could also mean the ideas/concepts/stories are spelled out more, perhaps to appeal to a younger demographic. If we dig a little deeper we see that the word cloud is mostly similar in all these, signifying similar language is being used. Just because a lot of the same words are being used doesn’t mean the subject matter is identical.

Finally, we come to the conclusion that just by analyzing the texts through Voyant, we figured out the subject material, the change in word count, relevant locations, vocabulary density, and frequently used words.