Using Python to see how the Times writes about men and women
Via colleague Derek Willis:
Ooof: Using Python to see how the Times writes about men and women: nbviewer.ipython.org/5105037 instructive on several levels.
— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) May 10, 2013
Neal Caren:
The data comes from last week’s (February 27, 2013-March 6, 2013) New York Times. I downloaded all the articles available through LexisNexis excluding only the corrections and paid obituaries. This totals 1,379 articles, or about 200 per day. Using a modified version of an old Python script, I removed all the metadata. put the text of each article in its own file, and placed all of the text files in a folder called articles. It is not the most efficient way to go about it, but sometimes the text data comes that way so I thought I would be useful to set it up that way for didactic purposes.
…[cool code and graphs]….
My quick interepretation[sic]: If your knowledge of men’s and women’s roles in society came just from reading last week’s New York Times, you would think that men play sports and run the government. Women do feminine and domestic things. To be honest, I was a little shocked at how stereotypical the words used in the women subject sentences were.
Just for fun on a Friday night.
