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CODING THE BECHDEL TEST

A Digital Humanities Coding Tutorial

CODING TUTORIAL

The tutorial is organized into steps below. It is recommended that you proceed through the tutorial in order.

WHAT IS THE BECHDEL TEST?

This part of the tutorial will describe some basic information on what the Bechdel Test is, and some introductory information on the computational methods we will be using.

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QUESTION ONE: IS THERE A NAMED WOMAN?

This part of the tutorial will being by using Machine Learning techniques to identify gender in the novel Wuthering Heights.

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QUESTION TWO: DOES SHE SPEAK TO ANOTHER NAMED WOMAN?

This part of the tutorial will be using dialogue tagging and network analysis theory to determine whether the women we identified in question one are speaking to each other.

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QUESTION THREE: IS THE TOPIC OF THEIR CONVERSATION SOMETHING OTHER THAN A MAN?

In this part of the tutorial, we will be analyzing the dialogue extracted from question two in order to determine which instances of dialogue between women in Wuthering Heights does not concern a man.

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ABOUT CODING THE BECHDEL TEST

Coding the Bechdel Test is a comprehensive tutorial for developing a computational version of the Bechdel Test for nineteenth century novels. Because this tutorial is invested in feminist coding practices, it does not assume that this code or this version of the test is the only solution that works, or works in the best way. As a result, users are invited to edit the code and try different methods for improving on this test. The code for this tutorial will be available as a Jupyter Notebook on Github and if any improvements are made to the code, users are encouraged to submit their improvements. This tutorial is deeply invested in feminist practice and inclusivity and welcomes feedback on the language of the tutorial as well as accessibility of material.

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CONTACT

averyblankenship@hotmail.com

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