Distant reading case study II

Feminist and intersectional approaches to Miley Cyrus's VMA2013 performance

Structural information

Ingest the data set into Voyant Tools and look at the word cloud. What words tell you something about the set up or structure of the data set? Watch out for the more "technical" terms to answer this question.

Main agents

Who are the main "agents" in the data set? Do you know anything about their relationship to each other, e.g. based on the video of the performance which you have watched at home? What is the agents' gender/ethnicity and why does it matter to the debate?

Analysing emotions

Which words say something about people's feelings? Are the feelings positive or negative? Note down the most important ones.

Keywords in context

Put some of the most prominent emotions into the context tool and check what triggered them. Are feelings associated with persons, or rather with what they do? Do any of the emotions expressed have a gender or race bias?

Terms berry / links to analyse co-occurences

Put the words "black", "white", "family", "children" and "women" into the terms berry or links tool and find out what words most frequently co-occur. What does that say about common perceptions of gender roles and/or racial dynamics in the data set?

Narrative developments in trends

Put "black", "white", "dancers", "rape", "twerk*" and "women" into the trends tool. What does that tell you about the enfolding of the Twitter debate?