At first when exploring the notion of creating a corpus, it was seemingly an easy task. Though, as I continued my journey in creating this corpus, I realized that my prior assumption couldn’t have been more false. Creating a corpus isn’t simply compiling random pieces of texts together. Rather, there are many other attributes in to creating a corpus that can actually be used to further one’s intelligence and knowledge on a subject. The whole point of a corpus is to ask questions, and gradually begin to get answers in order to create a bigger picture. This bigger picture doesn’t merely just answer a few questions but allows people to see a subject matter in a new light and sparks all new ideas.
My first exposure, to a corpus that truly brought light to a new subject was the one that we looked at in class. The slave narratives example was truly enlightening the way that the whole project was addressed. I found it absolutely fascinating to see all the things that most narratives have in common. With that, a common structure was also outlined within most of these narratives, and a structure to them is illuminated. Although, the purpose of the project was not to continuously revisit what most people know to be true about slave narratives. Instead, the objective of the project was to to uncover what hasn’t been discovered yet. There is an endless abyss of similarities and differences that could continuously be uncovered by scanning and analyzing all these texts. Furthermore, just by seeing all that could be done with one idea it inspired me to produce an insightful question that I wanted to seek answers on and have a project of my own.
With that being said, coming up with an idea was definitely not an easy task. I need to find a question that actually gave me, and others a deeper understanding about something relevant in the world. After much time I spent contemplating what I could possibly do my corpus on, analyzing the differences in political speech between male and female seemed fitting especially with the presidential elections just around the corner. To further this idea, I decided that I could represent the two speeches by two democrats (to eliminate and obvious differences), one being male and one being female. I chose to use Hillary Clintons political speeches as a representation for the female political speech. On the other hand, I chose Barack Obama as a representation for the male speech, also being a democrat, both making speeches in the same time period. With these speeches to fill my corpus I believe that it will allow me to better my understanding in the style and tone differences and similarities between male and and female political parties. This could also help identify which types of speech are more successful than others. In order to fully attain the most knowledge out of my project the most crucial part is for me to choose questions that will allow me to do this to the best of my ability. As I continue this project I am eager to see all the discoveries that will unfold and all that I will learn in analyzing my very own corpus.