Posture Magazine

2013 - 13

2014 - 41

2015 - 22

2016 - 11

2017 - 9

Posture Magazine

Posture Magazine is a queer run magazine based in New York City discussing new and upcoming individuals within the LGBTQ community.

"Our mission is to provide a platform for artists and independent designers, while bringing pivotal conversations to a global audience"

Donations are accepted as a 501(c) 3 company that provides a platform for emerging artists and writers to reach a global platform. It was only started in 2013 and has contributed to the every growing community of activists, artists, writers and those looking for an outlet from everyday life. Here I have chosen to focus solely on the articles written about the arts.

Speculations

Focusing on the arts in the world of data has given me a way to visualize the hot topics in the world through art. The data here shows how many articles about LGBTQ art had been published by Posture Magazine each year since its founding in 2013. The fact that Posture Magazine created a platform to spread ideas and in this case art with a growing LGBTQ community throughout the world by creating a place for expressing ones self. The data shown by the number of publications per year is reflected in politics.

In the year 2014, in America, by far was the most powerfully emotional campaigned year for the LGBTQ community. Same sex marriage was recognized by 38 states in the year 2014, where by the next year, 2015, our then President Obama made same sex marriage a federal law across all 50 states. Throughout the year 2014 voices were heard when it came to promoting the community positively and one of those ways was through art. It seems significant that Posture Magazine had only come into existence the year before, in 2013, seemingly having a profound impact on their readership since they are supported by donations and submitted articles. There seemed to be a need for a platform to speak out and here it was.

While the numbers seem to have lowered since the big spike in 2014, does not mean art and articles are not being created but there was a significant change in administration governing our country in the past year that has made environments a bit more hostile. In the case of the transgender individuals they have had a lot of heat due to our current president thinking it was ok to ban them from the military, if they or anyone finds they want to serve our country they should have every right to do so. The vice president taking a stance rooted deep in religious values does not or has not recognized that the LGBTQ community exists and requires recognition just as everyone else does in our country. These instances would be two of many reasons why a drop in writing or creation of art is seen in the data.

Methodology

To get the data that I needed to represent in a visual way was through web-scraping. I first found the magazine that I saw to have a significant impact in the LGBTQ community, that by me scraping for information would mean something and ultimately represent what an impact the rest of the world has on this community through art. I began by doing a search on the magazine's website to isolate the art from the rest of the material. From that one search I found nine pages of articles.

From there I set up to scrape for the title, image 'src' ink, and the date in three phases by using beautiful soup. Ultimately the script required a counter to make sure that the code would loop through all nine pages. Once I grabbed this information I set up as a dictionary that was then written out to a json file. The json file neatly represented my dictionary of the title, image 'src' link and date so that I could double check with the website that all that I was requesting was scraped for. I had two files, one for the code to scrape the website and a json file of all the data that I scraped for.

Now my question was how many articles were published per year? which required a separate code that aggregated the data that was on the json file. This third file was the counter that would add up how many articles were published per year since I had initially scraped for the date where it could be counted easily with a small code and voila! I had the data that I needed to draw a conclusion about artistic expression in the LGBTQ community being a center piece in written articles over the course of five years.

first set of code

dictionary to gather the information I was scraping for together

JSON file

Data counter