In class this week we analyzed Supergirl. This felt to me like the first time I engaged in a digital humanities research topic. The class was split up into multiple groups, with each group having their own objective. One group was to analyze how much a man was talking in the pilot episode, and another group timed the amount of time a woman was talking in the same episode. To do this we used an app called gender timer. The other groups were designated to use excel and time stamps to record when someone talked and when the conversations switched between characters.

It was difficult to stop and start the timer every time a new women talked or stop talking. I got a little flustered sometime, especially when characters talked over each other. I did have to leave the class about 8 minutes before Supergirl finished, as I had to get class. But the data I got up till that point was as follows:

Total Time Recorded: 36:55

Time a Woman was Speaking: 19:04

Total switches between female character: 37

In this pilot episode it seems that female characters talk much more than male characters. Though it is hard to make any final conclusions without first considered the data the other groups accounted for. But so far this acquisition make sense. The tv series main role is a women, and it is very apparent that they are pushing a very feminist perspective on the plot. It makes sense for women to talk more than men. This is only the first episode though, and we cannot judge an entire series by just one episode. More research must be done on the entire season to come up with a final conclusion to the data.

I did learn very useful tools and methods by doing this. Gender timer is a good tool for future research proposals, and I learned how to add timestamps down to the seconds with google sheets. This was a very good preparation for the final semester project that we will have assigned soon in this class.