Becoming Animals with Victorians

As I reported in a previous blog, I had to expand my sampling for mammals, since bird blocks were scarce in the National Museum of Scotland's collection. I found enough blocks to make a content analysis sample. Here is what I found. Vertebrates make the largest proportion of images in both encyclopaedias. In the first edition, there are 602, in the second edition, there are 548 images. In the first edition, birds make up 38% of the vertebrate category (226 birds) while in the second edition, they make up 35% (293). Therefore I thought that birds would provide a good sample if I measured the blocks. However, I only found a handful of blocks depicting birds for the second edition. So I needed to also sample another subcategory, mammals. Mammals make up 34% of vertebrates in the first edition, and 36% of vertebrates in the second edition.

There were fewer images in the second edition overall than in the first edition. The category vertebrates had 54 fewer images in total. But of those 54 images, 33 images taken out were of birds. Only 8 were of mammals. That means than fish, replies and amphibians which together make up 24% of the total of images together account for the other 13 images subtracted from this category. So, in depicting the natural world, more images of birds were taken out. Below is a histogram showing mammals and data I collected from the blocks. The top graph with green columns shows the distribution of block size in the first edition, while the bottom graph with blue columns shows the second edition's distribution of block size. Now that I have the data, I need to put together the presentation for the conference next week.