Feminism is currently a hotly-debated topic. Many people claim to be feminists, while others believe feminism is ridiculous and unnecessary.
For my project, I chose to analyze ten articles from popular women's magazines and ten articles from popular men's magazines. I therefore created two separate Voyant pages, which I'll compare. When I looked up the articles, I used the "search" function with the word "feminism" (or "feminist" if "feminism" didn't appear). I then chose the first article that contained a significant amount of text (5+ paragraphs).
I'm not very familiar with the Voyant tool, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. One thing I did notice was that in the women's word cloud, the words "feminism" or "feminist" popped up fairly large and obvious (word count 55), while in the men's word cloud, the word "feminism" appeared in very small print, only after increasing the wordcount view to a number around 155. Below is the women's word cloud, and then the men's. If you need a larger view, feel free to export each word cloud, which will open in a new page.
The above observation led me to look at the Contexts tool. For the women's magazines, "feminism" has 22 results related to what people think feminism means and the importance of talking about feminism (see Contexts tool below). It was connected to words like "powerful," "democracy," and "equality." For the men's magazines, "feminism" had 10 results, and related to how the term can be intimidating and doesn't appear very digestible.
To a point, this result is what I expected. Men's magazines don't talk about feminism as much as women's, and when they do, they're a little bit scared of what they think it means, or beyond that, they don't really know what it means.
I'm not totally sure how to interpret this data. I did notice, though, that in the Summary tool, the men's articles include almost double the word count of the women's, and yet the men's magazines mention feminism less. This could support my hypothesis of men in general avoiding talking about feminism. The women's word count is below, followed by the men's.
After analyzing both Voyant results, my final conclusion is that men don't really talk about feminism in popular culture - at least not recently, and not as much as women. This leads me to believe that a large number of men either don't like feminism or don't care about it. I guess the next step would be to figure out why. Is my sample representative of an actual belief, or is it skewed by my small amount of data?
But I think that would take a lot more more sampling, so this is where we end - with an interesting observation and potential for future research.
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