Technical Notes

For the purpose and intention of this project, I took around 2,500 issues of the Washington and Lee student newspaper, the Ring-tum Phi, dating back to the 1960s up until 2013, and generated a corpus which contained a total of 19,414,836 words. To do this I took the complete volume text files available on the wludh GitHub repository and grouped them into larger text files based on the time intervals I wanted to work with. I divided the time span into five-year intervals: 1960 to 1965, 1965 to 1970, 1970 to 1975, 1975 to 1980, 1980 to 1985, 1985 to 1990, 1990 to 1995, 1995 to 2000, 2000 to 2005, and 2005 to 2013, with a predicted spike in the usage of women-referring nouns around 1985 when Washington and Lee first went co-ed. I settled on the 5-year intervals in order to more accurately examine the changes in language before and after the coeducation decision.

Separately, I also assembled a textual corpus of 32 letters and correspondences between alumni and the administration pertaining to coeducation, and dating back to the years 1983-1985, which by itself contained 28,281 words. I then performed an in-depth text analysis on both corpora using the textual analysis tool Voyant, mining all texts for the words “woman”, “women”, “girl”, “girls”, “lady”, “ladies”, “female”, and “females”, in order to draw conclusions based on how many times each word is mentioned in the texts coming from each separate time period. I also looked into what context those words are being used for each time period, basing that off of word connections and contextual analysis. Finally, I generated a timeline connecting trends in the language used to refer to women over time to important events and moments associated with the feminist movement in the United States.

To build this project, I used a pre-made template called "Massively" from the HTML5 UP! website, which I customized to my liking, as well as the topic and purpose of the project. The only thing I kept from the original template is the overall look and structure of the site: I changed everything else from the background image to the style of the fonts to how the pages are structured. I wanted the website to have a collage-y, newspaper-y aesthetic, so I used an image of some old Ring-tum Phi copies as the background image. I tried to keep the design as simple as possible, so I used mostly black and white in terms of color. I removed any unnecessary elements, such as the contact form, excessive lists, buttons, and tables. I also added thematic break lines to separate the pages into meaningul sections.

For the timeline, I used some publicly available code by Krishna Babu which I found on OnAirCode. I wanted it to move up and down rather than sideways, allowing the user move through events gradually, by scrolling down. This was inspired by the Administrative Response Timeline of the Take Back the Archive project from UVA, which is similar, but visualizes the history of the University's responses, or lack thereof, to sexual violence juxtaposed with students' voices.