Please refer to this Google Doc for pictures: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3MzhbvGPuNPL0cd3yeq_ANqv29E0QtA_sSWYPeByso/edit?ts=59f8f4cc#
We took a look at color (or ‘colour’) in word trends using the terms and context tools. An issue that was apparent straight off the bat is that with poetry it’s always a good rule of thumb to keep a thesaurus handy. There are many creative and descriptive words that can be used to give flair or describe a specific shade of color more accurately. But for the sake of time and not trying to kill the server we limited our search to basic colors on the wheel and the word “crimson.” The word count for each while although significant low in comparison to the entire collections do show some interesting trends. The first three most used colors were in the exact same order for each book; black, blue, and red, with black being significantly higher than the other two which were almost used equally. The rest of the color words (pink, purple, white, green, orange, yellow, brown, and crimson) weren’t used very much at all. The World’s Wife also tended to use color terms more than Standing Female Nude. Also also Duffy’s use of these color terms weren’t very cliche and standard. There was a lot of variety. All in all, while this search is flawed it would appear that Duffy doesn’t use word trends like colors too often in her poetry.
An interesting trend in The World’s Wife is that the most common words are body parts. In the top 5 most common words, three of them are body parts – eyes, face, and hands. When counting the number of times body parts words appear in the 50 most common words, there are 138 instances of body part words (eyes, face, hands, hand, head, ear, tongue, mouth). We got these numbers from the Cirrus cloud tool as well as the Terms tool. When looking at these words in the Word Trends tool, they all show up a lot together. There is one instance of hand* showing up a lot more than all the other words, but many body part words show up mostly at the same time. And when there aren’t certain body part words showing up, others don’t show up either. It is an interesting contrast to how many times the word “love” shows up – only 13 times (which is much less than in Standing Female Nude).
Further looking into the difference in the use of body parts and how it changes between Standing Female Nude and The World’s Wife. The words hand, eye, breast, face and ear are collectively used 62 times in Standing Female Nude and 124 times in The Worlds Wife, almost twice as much.. As Duffy explores the concept of portraying the world, specifically scenes traditionally seen in a masculine context, from a woman’s perspective, she ironically seems to focus more on the world from a physical perspective, and draws the reader to reflect not on just the emotional differences between masculine and feminine characters but the physical difference as well.
We screwed around in Voyant focusing on gender and pronouns. In the first graph we were only looking at Standing Female Nude. It was interesting to look at “she” and “her” together, as they follow each other pretty closely except for one at point 8. Collectively, we wish Voyant could sort things by poems instead of by arbitrary section because we really wanted to know which poem or area it was that broke that trend. Just looking at this graph, it feels to us as if male-centric words have come a bit behind female-centric ones, however there are many times where “he” comes as the top frequency of all the words we tested, especially towards the end. We’re not really sure what to make of the trends because we didn’t notice this big of a switch in the gender-oriented words of the book while we were reading.
In the second graph, we were comparing pronouns between the books. While “I” was the most common pronoun by far in either book (which tells us a lot about Duffy’s poetic style by itself), “you” plummeted from Standing Female Nude to The World’s Wife, with “he” and “me” rising in popularity to second and third place. “She,” previously in fourth place fell into last. This makes a lot of sense to me because in pretty much all of the poems in The World’s Wife, the speaker is speaking in first person about another person, usually male. There’s not a lot of female to female interaction, so the “I” character would not be saying “she” a lot, and because she’s not speaking directly to the man in most cases, the word “you” is also a lot less common than in Duffy’s “normal” poetry.
The above graph represents the usage of the words “love” and “man” in conjunction with each other through Standing Female Nude and The World’s Wife (where purple is “love” and orange is “man”). The first half of the graph (segments 1-10) represents the usage of “love” and “man” within Standing Female Nude, while the second half of the graph (segments 11-20) represents the usage of these words within The World’s Wife.
Standing Female Nude’s graph is erratic and shows no correlation between the two terms. The lines often stray in opposite directions, intersect, or drop to zero quickly. The World’s Wife, however, shows an interesting parallelism between the two terms: both terms mirror each other in their usage, with “love” being used slightly more than “man” until the latter half of the novel, where both terms are used equally, for the most part.
We took a look specifically at the word “love” and how similar its frequency was with the word “man.” Between the two texts these were two of the most used words so it was interesting to see how they were split up between the two texts. The word “love” was used significantly more than “man” in Standing Female Nude while in The World’s Wife it was used at almost the same frequency. Even though the words are used less in The World’s Wife they are used with relatively the same frequency which perhaps could indicate that they are more related to each other within the context of the book.
Looking at the bubblelines tool to observe the same words it can appear to be the other way around. According to what we saw with the previous graph that even though the word “love” appears many times that it’s inclusion with the word “man” would not be consistent. That was an incorrect assumption though so it’s good to use a second tool to evaluate things.
We all started out looking at the Word Trends tool and noticed different aspects of the words that were showing up. One of the most common trends that was noticed was that “man” and “love” trended together a lot in The World’s Wife, but not as much in Standing Female Nude. Another common trend was the TWW had a lot of body part terms, which SFN did not have. Colors were also analyzed and most of them were colors associated with negative feelings, but overall there wasn’t a specific trend. As a group, we may not have come to a firm conclusion in what we screwed around with, but we did learn together how to use Voyant, particularly the word trends tool, to analyze text and screw around.
