My historical question is in the title, “How did the average American live before the great depression?”. This seemed like a fairly easy question to answer, as many of the interviews I read focused on their life growing up, rather than life during the depression, or during the time of the interview. The initial ideas I had for this question, were that the interviewees would talk much about their family, their struggles, like familial deaths, and their high points, like marriage and raising a child. Pretty much, I was hoping that they would focus on the very highs, and the very lows of their life. I assumed that there would be talk about traditions, sprinklings of bigotry here and there due to the time period, and a focus on the good parts of their lives before the depression.
Since this was a very general question, my idea was to use most of not all of the sources gathered in the corpus. However, there would obviously be a lot of words inside the hundreds of interviews that needed to be taken out to better see the juicy bits. First, I filtered out words pertaining to the meta data, like the website URL, words “Library of Congress” and the like. Then I focused less on the most common words, as they were mostly, “Got, Like, and Said”, which are worthless not understanding the full context. I focused more on the words said a few hundred times, rather than those said thousands of times, as they were usually more telling of what the interview was about. Words like “father, mother, school, and children” helped me understand the focus of the interviews better.
Using Voyant tools wasn’t too hard, as we already went over it in class and thanks to Miriam Posner’s tutorial on it. 1 I found the “Document terms” particularly useful, as it showed the exact number of times a certain term was used throughout the corpus. This helped me see the less than average terms better than in the cirrus tool which only really showed the most common terms. My main decision I made was to focus on not the most common terms, but the less than common terms which might have been buried under very common words. That way, I could find more context within words rather than general terms used in that time period.
My question stayed generally the same throughout the text analysis, as the terms I gathered focused on family and the struggles they may have faced. My assumptions that they would focus on traditions held in their family was a bit wrong, as many people seem to have talked about a very general idea of their childhood or life before the depression, rather than many specifics. This makes sense as the Federal Writer’s Project focuses on capturing as much of history as possible, rather than much specific details. 2 Interestingly enough, it was more common for people to talk about their mother rather than their father, which shows me that mothers might be more important to these people’s lives than their fathers. With what I did with close reading, I found that the interviewees would commonly talk about general ideas about growing up, such as people they kind of maybe knew rather than any specific traditions or cultural backgrounds they had.
The final conclusion I have with my question is that many people remembered the past with a certain level of nostalgia or fondness of their past. They focused more on their mothers rather than fathers as well, which is interesting. They would talk about the people that were close to their family, and what they thought about them. Overall, life before the depression seemed simple, however it comes from a place of nostalgia so it might not be very reliable. Pertaining to close and distant reading, I conclude that both have advantages and disadvantages that can help and hinder one another. You can get a good general idea from distant reading; however, you should supplement it with close reading so that you can get a good idea of what’s going on.
