For my distant reading project, I chose to analyze texts regarding both the musical and movie versions of Wicked. Specifically, I looked at audience reviews of both the musical and movie to compare viewer perceptions of both of these. Additionally, I looked at texts that compared the two in one article. I compiled these texts such that all musical reviews were together, all movie reviews were grouped, and all comparative reviews were also together. This way, when it was time to input them into Word Clouds or Voyant, it was easy to compare these three categories with each other. I kept these grouped together for all of my visualizations.
I found this visualization particularly interesting, as it compares the frequency of positive words among comparative reviews, movie reviews, and musical review. This was meant to see which version of Wicked had the best reviews, compared to an overall look at both the musical and movie in one review. “Good” and “great” were said significantly more in the reviews of the movie(s), suggesting that the reviews around the movie may have been more positive. This was surprising, since at the beginning of the project, I had predicted that the musical would have much better audience reactions.
These two above visualizations represent reviews of the movie(top) vs. the musical (bottom) through word clouds. Interestingly, one of the most frequent words in the musical reviews was “movie.” This suggests that the musical reviews may have been talking about the musical in relation to the movie. Overall, a lot of the words used between these different reviews are relatively similar.
This last visual shows how frequently the three categories of reviews mention different elements of the movie/musical. The costumes were mentioned in the movie reviews but not the musical reviews, so it is possible that the costumes in the movie were a point of emphasis in the reviews, where they were not as important in the movie. Also, the word music showed up much more frequently in the musical reviews than the movie reviews. This suggests that music was one of the most talked about pieces of the musical, and was the audience’s biggest takeaway from the musical.
Overall, these visuals have provided me with valuable insight regarding these texts. I have learned that a lot of the same ideas/words come up in the different categories of texts, which makes sense considering the musical and movies were pretty similar. All of the texts seem relatively positive and are likely praising both versions of Wicked. This project showed me just how much I could learn about a topic without actually having to read a bunch of texts!
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