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Visualizing the "Advice to the Ladies of London": |
About the ProjectThree related ballads in the Pepys Collection discuss the "advice" ladies ought to follow in choosing a husband and the relationship of that advice to the men between whom they are choosing. These ballads are a portion of the texts that I look at in the fourth chapter of "Pushing through Paradox," in which I argue that the multitude of behaviors and seeming agency available to women is in fact geared towards the maintenance or restoration of order. Using word frequency visualization, I am able to perform another level of close-reading in which I look at the words associated with agency in networks to show a part of the cycle of behavior that appears to be subversive, but whose goal is in fact reconciliation with societal norms. The MethodAfter an initial read-through of each of the ballads during which I performed a traditional close reading, I uploaded the texts to IBM's Many Eyes. Many Eyes allows you to choose your visualizations, and I chose a tag cloud and word tree for each of the three texts. I then consulted my initial close readings and the tag clouds for words that might yield interesting results in the word trees. In order to make the word trees easier for users to interact with, I modernized and Americanized the spelling in each of the transcriptions and removed contractions (Many Eyes does not like apostrophes). On the about the ballads page, I make available the original spelling transcriptions, which follow the transcription rules set forth by the English Broadside Ballad Archive. |