Link to findings: http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=b68db9153f292a709e2ec19bbd7fb11d
Wonder Woman is an action packed superhero film, in which Diana and her local tribe work to save the allied powers in World War I. Throughout the course of this blog I will analyze the movie scripts from 2009 and 2017 and compare my findings. Furthermore, I will analyze what those findings mean and apply it to our textbook to determine how it is digital humanities.
First, I took both movie scripts and plugged them into Voyant Tools, a database that articulates a variety of graphs and charts depicting word density, word frequency, etc. Having heard about the plot of the movie, I know that Diana is a goddess who is fighting for her tribe in the Amazon. After plugging both scripts in and analyzing the most frequent words, Diana came up 82 times in both scripts while goddess came up 45 times. This is interesting in itself because Diana was born a half goddess, but goes by her actual name more frequently. I know that if I had any part of god/goddess in me I would ensure that everybody knew about it. However, when analyzing the trend graph which portrays the top five most used words and how frequently they come up over the course of the movie, I found an interesting spot. Diana’s name itself fluctuates when getting brought up and does not drastically shoot up in raw frequency until the middle to end of the movie. This could be due in part to her tribe trusting her more as a human than a goddess.
“Rather than summarizing the result of a project and drawing conclusions, researchers can make the entire data set available online, enabling other users to test hypotheses and even to add to and edit the ‘original’ data set and accompanying metadata” (Burdick, 58). I found this quote from Burdick interesting and fitting to this topic. The entire point of Voyant Tools is to test hypotheses one might have about a script, song lyrics, etc. Anybody can add and edit the original script which in turn would impact your frequency results. This is a form of digital humanities in that one can learn word frequency and make their own assumptions and judgments about a particular matter.
Hurricane: A Storm of Digital Humanities 