The Marsden Journals Work Site: Tools for Investigating The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist

The purpose of these pages is to see what we can reveal about The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist with the help of a range of visualization tools and quantitative analysis. These three journals are unique among the MJP’s collection inasmuch as they were all published and edited by the same woman, Dora Marsden, between 1911 and 1919; we might thus view them as three journals in one. But the journals also underwent dramatic changes during this period, not just in name but in content, outlook, contributor networks, and genres published: while The Freewoman began as a radically feminist magazine with an interest in suffrage and anarchism, The Egoist wound up as a literary magazine at the forefront of British modernism. By accessing the data from the MJP’s metadata files and text transcripts for these journals, we hope to provide a whole new way to study their make-up and evolution over time.

Part 1: An Overview of the Marsden Journals

• a timeline of the three journals, visualizing their duration and frequency of publication
• six bar charts depicting the duration of the journals, as well as their total number of issues, pages, words, contributors, and contributions
• visualizations of all the words used in the three journals

Part 2: Contributor Networks in the Marsden Journals (coming soon).

Part 3: Genre in the Marsden Journals

• Charts depicting the extent and distribution of genres in the three journals, measured by word count and number of contributors
• Network graphs depicting contributions made to four genres in the journals: articles, letters, poetry, and fiction
• Gephi graphs depicting book review networks (reviewers and the authors they reviewed) in the three journals
• Voyant graphs foregrounding prominent words from the journals’ different genres