My individual project will be a critical comparison of the themes present in works by male and female authors and will aim to decipher geographical variances in the birth countries and publication locations of male and female authors. This project would encapsulate the entire smart data from the time period 1961-1990 from the Writers, Readers, and Scenes: Visualizing Caribbean Literary Encounters project.

This project will strive to answer the following research questions:

  1. What are the thematic differences between the works of female and male authors, and which gender has a higher propensity to write books of a specific theme such as gender and sexuality in comparison to politics?
  2. Which countries have the highest concentration of female and male authors in the Caribbean region?
  3. What are the geographical variances in the publication of books by female and male authors?

This topic first piqued my interest as I was researching for books within my time period, 1971–1980. I realized that the majority of the books published within this range were written by male writers. As such, I wondered if there was a stark difference in the ratio of male and female authors within the other time periods of the project. I also hypothesized that this difference was due to the different ideas and stories present in works by male and female writers. Possibly the concepts and themes written by male writers were more accepted by the general public. Another observation I made was that the books within my time period were heavily concentrated on a few countries. This led me to wonder if countries of a certain speaker language, such as Anglophone or Francophone, had a higher percentage of male or female authors, as well as how widespread the publication of books was for male and female authors. This project would allow me to test my hypothesis and explore these initial observations to determine if these characteristics exist within the entire project or are limited to my time period.

My individual project would be a combination of large-scale textual analysis and topic modelling and a geographic mapping site, which would be visually represented as a semi-linear, customizable narrative that includes text, images, audio, and/or video. To complete the thematic representation of the project, I will create different corpuses of the books written by female and male authors from Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Lusophone Caribbean countries. Each corpus would be added to Voyant, so the key themes can be found through distant reading. This would be represented using Jekyll with additional analysis, pictures, videos, and sounds. Furthermore, snippets from the original texts of selected authors would be given to further highlight the themes. The geographical representation of the project would be created using ArcGIS or Google maps and included in the main wax or TEI websites if plausible.

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