Telephone (1970 - 1983) Contributor Data Analysis
Data Description and Analysis
Collection of Data
The data behind the Onodo contributor network stems from an Excel spreadsheet I created with the data I gathered from PDF files of the original 19 issues of the Telephone magazine. To create a data entry, the name of each contributor is first entered in the "Name" column. I set the contributor's visibility to 1 (true), and enter their sex and number of works contributed afterwards. To determine the sex of each contributor, I mainly used the contributor's name. If a contributor's name was obviously masculine or feminine, I would assign that contributor a sex accordingly. However, if any contributor's name was even slightly ambiguous (unlike John or Barbara), I would use results from a Google search to determine that contributor's sex. An Excel formula I created would then take a look at the data entry for that contributor and generate a statement in HTML based on the data I already entered. Uploading the finished Excel spreadsheet to Onodo resulted in the data visualization shown above, with each contributor node connected to its associated issues. Clicking on each node reveals the exact number of works that each contributor sent in to the Telephone magazine, which unfortunately could not have been expressed in a more obvious way.
Data Analysis
This artifact's main purpose is to examine and confirm Maureen Owen's efforts in the Telephone magazine to create an all-inclusive space for poets of all sexes, race, and sexualities. With the data collected, which focused on the sex of each Telephone contributor as well as their frequency of contribution, I hope to reveal trends that align with Owen's original intentions in publishing and editing the Telephone magazine, which were to create an all-inclusive literary space for established and unestablished poets alike, regardless of sex, race, or other unique characteristics.
As I had hoped, the contributor data for Telephone aligns almost perfectly with Owen's intentions. Looking at specific numbers, the ratio of female-to-male contributors to the Telephone magazine is 235:406 (235 female contributors to 406 male contributors). Reducing this number to an estimation, the female-to-male ratio in the Telephone contributor list is around 1:2. In other words, for every one female contributor published in the Telephone magazines, two male contributors were published. While this is not exactly gender equality, it is most definitely a significantly larger ratio than those present in other major collaborative mimeo-magazines published at the same time, like The World. Based on that observation, it is safe to say that Owen's intention in getting larger female representation in the world of poetry is reflected in her publication of the Telephone magazine.
The data I collected is very limited in finding other trends. However, by observing the compiled data on the amount of contributions each contributor had, it can be said that Owen's intention of making Telephone all-inclusive regardless of a poet's level of fame was also reflected in the magazine's publication. This claim is heavily supported by the fact that, as more issues were published, each issue saw less "regular" contributors and more contributors who were new to the Telephone magazine. In publishing each collection of poetry, Owen must have made a conscious effort to include less established poets so that their voices could be heard alongside those of the well-known, established voices of poetry present in many of Telephone's other issues.
Error and Limitations
However extensive the data collection may seem, it is far from perfect and has several errors and limitations. The largest limitation of my dataset is the fact that it only includes information about the contributor's name, sex, and number of works they contributed to the Telephone magazine. This makes finding trends unrelated to sex or frequency of contributions difficult or impossible. Additionally, small spelling errors present in both the spreadsheets I created and in the original PDF files of the Telephone magazine contribute to slightly skewed data and unexplained contributor nodes that are not connected to any magazine issues. For example, a contributor listed in an early issue of Telephone could have been listed again in a later issue, but with a slight change in spelling. The omission of a middle initial when re-listing a contributor in a later issue was common, as were spelling mistakes that were righted in only in the later issues. Additionally, unexplained bugs with the Onodo software has led to empty links that connected nonexistent nodes to random issues. This could be due to the size of the source spreadsheet or some formatting error. Despite these issues, thanks to the sample size of our data, it is still safe to observe and accept the trends extracted from the dataset. The issues previously discussed affect only a small percentage of the data which should not significantly affect the observable trends in the data regarding the representation of each sex and the frequency of each contributor.
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Shown in the image below are empty links caused by either a bug in the Onodo software, a typo, or a unexplained formatting issue in the Excel spreadsheet.
