This project takes comments from 2020-2021 and plots them in an interactive scatterplot using the Scattertext tool, showing the most common words in annotations of Shakespeare's play "A Winter's Tale" about class, gender, pandemics, race, religion, and sexuality relative to the rest of the corpus of annotations.
The closer a point is to the top of the plot, the more frequently it was used by the category plotted on the y-axis (e.g. Class).
The further right a point is, the more that word was used in other categories rather than the category plotted on the y-axis.
Words frequently used in both contexts appear in the top right corner.
If a word rarely appears in the entire corpus, it would be in the bottom left.
Click below to select the category of annotation you'd like to see plotted in comparison to the rest of the annotations.
This project attempts to harness the ability of data visualization in order to convey the insights possible from a project like this.
Our users have some fantastic ideas and often come up with insights that we as researchers could not have made-- the project is really about the connections and relationships our users make to their own lives across the various stages of the pandemic.
It has slowly evolved past the users themselves into something that yields fascinating patterns, trends, and re-contextualizations of Shakespeare's work in our modern plague years.
Scattertext was a tool I had previously seen employed to analyze the rhetoric from both parties on either side of the 2016 election, and I thought it would be fascinating applied in this context given its ability to quickly give people a sense of commonalities and dissimilarities.
There's also something to be said for our times only becoming more fraught as years go by, and rhetoric more and more important to understand.
Data used in this project was anonymized and pulled directly from comments made by users -- it was important to us for people to be able to see the full comments associated with the words in the scatterplot as well as the quotes that they pulled from.
I recommend taking a look at the top left corner words in every single category: some really interesting content to be explored there.
Happy visualizing!