Search for Words in Move and TV SubTitles [Interactive Feature]

Many of use have students who use content anaylsis as method of observation.  This tool was created by Benjamin Schmidt, history professor at Northeastern, and will likely be useful to students performing content analyses as well as professors covering the sociology of media in their classrooms.  You can type words into the search boxes and the tool searches TV and movies dialogue (It is based on Subtitles). You can filter the results by TV show, movie genres, etc. Clicking on the line will actually direct you to the specific  texts.

I think it is interesting  way to show how the media reflects and constructs culture.

Here is the link to the tool: http://movies.benschmidt.org/

For example, I looked at he usage of gay vs. lesbian over time and posted the information below.  You can see that TV shows are much more likely to mentions "gay" than they are to mention "lesbian". Ask your students to speculate on why.  [The large spike in 1951 seems to come from one particular i Love Lucy episode. Unfortunately, you don't always know the context of the word.]

I still wan to play around with this more and haven't yet used it in class but it seems like a great tool.