Elimination Charts
While Voyant is great for analyzing trends and the context of a single word across a whole document, nothing quite replaces a close reading of the sources. Since this corpus is only six months of Bulletins and not several years, it was possible to create a spreadsheet that tallied categories of censorship. Going beyond the common topics censored that have been identified using Voyant (here), this close reading tracks categories, such as violence, sex, animals, and harming society. In order to create these categories, a Google Sheets spreadsheet was created with color-coded rows by category. This allowed for variations to be recorded within each category while still tallying the total. The totals for each month were then combined to form a master spreadsheet that tallied every bit of censorship that occurred in the Bulletins from Septemeber 1915 - February 1916. A screenshot of the spreadsheet is included below.
Spreadsheet
Using the Total of Totals section of the spreadsheet, particular data was selected to create accurate charts. Not all of the data in the color-coded sections could be included because it would skew the percentages, but only the bolded titles, which are the totals for that section, were included to create the visualization. Row 10 "Violence - Gendered," was also not included. While this was an interesting piece of data to keep track of, its inclusion would skew the percentages. However, note that of the 895 counts of violence, 181 of them, or 20%, were between a man and a woman. This does not argue a point about the content of censorship, but does creating an interesting perspective on the content of films at the time.
Columns
A close reading of the Bulletins reveals that violence heavily outweighs all other categories. This is not startling given the violent nature of human culture across all media (films, books, plays, and even music), and the censorship topics analysis. But the close reading illuminates several facets of censorship that the Voyant, distant reading, could not. A significant portion of the censorship after violence is devoted to things of sexual nature. This sort of elimination would be worded differently each time it appeared, and thus would not be tracked as well through Voyant. The censorship of dangerous animals is noted in the Network Visualization and appears here. There is also a single instance where a filmmaker attempted to include an anti-censorship paragraph at the beginning of the film, and rather ironically, the censors ordered it eliminated.
Pie Chart
The combination of distant and close reading provides a more well-rounded picture of the censorship work of the Ohio Board of Film Censorship. The topics identified by the Voyant analysis are an accurate depiction of the kinds of eliminations frequently requested of films, and the use of the Collocates and Contexts tools shows the connection between smoking and gender. But, as the pie chart above illustrates, smoking was only 4.8% of the eliminations requested in this corpus. There were a vast variety of interesting and quirky things that the censors requested be removed from films that can be focused on, but the pie chart reorients the researcher's perspective to remember how small those pieces are, and that violence was by far the most common category of censorship.