Contemporary Folk Music
Analysis
Use these links to check out the analysis and components for analysis that we devised
from our data! Each link provides a page with the corresponding analysis and
descriptions detailing its use and importance in relation to our research question.
Theme Count Bar Graph
Table of Nouns with Subthemes
Below is our analysis write up, it includes some of the results we found from our data. Since we used such a small sample we utilized a descriptive approach to our analysis based solely on our corpus, and not a projective one since we cannot make any generalized conclusions. With that said, we did find some trends that we would like to discuss. Even if our sample size does not show great evidence of any particular trend at this point, we are hopeful that it can lead to further investigations in the future.
With our theme count bar graph analysis, you can see our break down of songs by theme. We have displayed the results by language as well as a part of our analysis for our original research question. You can reach that page by clicking here or on the link near the top of this page. Because of the limited size of the data, we could not produce any significant results. However, there seems to be a correlation between politically themed songs in English and Spanish. In almost all of the cases for political, political social, and political regional, the only songs with these themes were English and Spanish (with the exception of political social which had just 2 Italian songs and 1 Japanese song). It is entirely possibly that this was skewed by the songs that we chose. Since we did not scientifically pick our songs, there is bound to be some bias when it come to the songs we chose. It could also be the case that since both the Spanish and English songs came from different countries as opposed to Japanese and Italian songs, it was more likely that there would be more political songs available. Most countries have artists that produce at least one song that has political conotations. Looking back, it is possible that it would have been a better decision to choose songs from one country and analyze our research by country instead of by language. Languages like Spanish and English that are not singular to one country and one culture can definitely be different than languages that are mainly related to one culture and country. It is also possible that the song preferences of the person that chose the songs or the availability of lyrics online affected the output of this analysis.
In addition, we looked at subthemes within nouns but chose to display our results using a table instead of a bar chart as with the overall song themes. You can reach that page by clicking here or by clicking the link near the top of this page. Again, these results are not determined to be conclusive in a projective sense because of our limited corpus. As expected, when there were a high number of culturally themed nouns in a song, the song tended to be a socially themed song. Another idea that this table shows about these songs is that politically themed songs have a lot of instances of war themed nouns or just politically themed nouns. Religiously themed nouns seem to occur in all different kinds of themes. Of the three basic themes, political, social, and regional, a religiously themed noun seems to occur equally in each of those overall themes. Nouns that have a love theme seemed to occur more in politically social themed songs than in just social songs. This was a surprising result, and it would be interesting to see if this result is reproducible or if this result was affected by the song choices. One thing to note is that this analysis is not telling of all nouns within songs because not all of the songs had nouns that had subthemes, even though they had overall themes as songs themselves.
Since this is such a small data set there is plenty of further work that could be done. It is unethical to make projective conclusions based on the results found here but this can be used as a stepping stone for further research.