Austin Urch
Peer reviewed by Shane Leigh and Michael Innacelli
Taylor Swift and her music has almost always been synonymous with breakups, boyfriends, and drama. With all six of her albums landing inside the top five of peak chart positions after release (five of the six having sat at number one), her music and lyrics has definitely reached the ears of listeners and the audience has picked up on themes similarly to what was mentioned in the opening lines. However, taking a distant reading of all the lyrics on her fourth album, Red (2012), using the tool “Voyant” I was able to discover some interesting information. What is “distant reading” though? Distant reading is utilizing a computer program or programs to quickly analyze a text. In the words of Burdick, distant reading “focuses on larger units…in order to reveal patterns” (Burdick 38). Distant reading allows us to see information differently than we normally would have and in much less time. A computer can analyze all of Shakespeare’s works almost instantaneously without error which is very helpful to humans since it would take years of hard work to analyze a small part of the information the way that programs are able.
What exactly did I find? Well, the two words of substance (not including conjunctions, exclamations, or “like”) that appeared the most throughout the album are “know” and “time” which show up seventy-seven and fifty-two times respectively. This came as a surprise to me since as an avid listener of Taylor Swift’s music, I had the preconceived notion that the most repetitive lyrics would be something like love or much more romantic. The idea of knowing and self awareness caught me off guard despite listening to the songs as much as I do. The media has often portrayed Swift in a light that paints her as dependent on a man and needing to have a boyfriend and romantic partner. The subtlety of the repetition perhaps is an attempt to prove the media wrong that she is confident in exactly who she is and where she is in her life at this time. The inclusion of the word time fifty-two times shows the could speak on the amount of time that passed between the release of the previous album, Speak Now (2010), and when she released Red (2012). The two year gap is not uncommon in her trend of album releases but in the time between the two, Swift made a large jump across genres, moving away from “country pop” to “pop, country, and rock” individually. The two years time between albums could have been emphasized because of the change to Swift’s music and her personality. A sense of maturity continued to emerge with the Red album. She sounded older, talked about more “mature” themes, and literally aged. At the release of Speak Now, she was twenty-one years old and then twenty-three at the release of Red. In the current election season, she is increasingly posting about voting and encouraging fans and everyone to vote. 
This was only one album though so I would be interested to see what would come up if I continued my research and expanded to all of Taylor Swift’s albums with another distant reading in the future, especially with her continuing to age, as we all do in time, and grow in maturity.
Hurricane: A Storm of Digital Humanities 