Journal of Cultural Activities

Fluctuations in the visual representation of women in Time magazine reflect the historical context of the era. We observe that the number of images of women's faces in the magazine increases during periods of increased participation in public life and decreases during periods of backlash against feminism. These changing societal attitudes towards women were also (unsurprisingly) reflected in the textual content in Time magazine, but it is particularly interesting that an overview of the faces in the corpus also reflect these attitudes.  

This is significant because this shows that we can examine magazine corpora through computational analytical means and arrive at the same result as a humanistic close-reading of the corpus, giving us new methods by which to understand our cultural history. It is also important to understand how images translate into meaning because we live in a post-literate world in which information is increasingly absorbed through images over text.  

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