On our first lecture day, Professor Dauterive informed our class that we would be given the freedom to study whatever subject interested us, so long as it was done within the context of the 1930s and the Great Depression. Upon hearing this news, my mind immediately began to race to find a subject that fascinated me, and I was quick to discover it – aviation.
For this assignment, I decided to explore the world of aviation during the Great Depression and ask myself the following questions: What impediments were there to pilots during this time period, and how did pilots manage to find employment in the face of these obstacles?
To answer these questions, I began by first deciding upon my corpus. Because the subject of aviation is relatively niche, I thought it best to employ all of the documents uploaded by our class and available in our course’s Dropbox. Following this, I began to search for words related to aviation such as flying and pilot and reading excerpts from the texts in which they were found.
In her essay, Race and Place: Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the Ex-Slave Narratives, Lauren Tilton used topic modeling – the categorizing of words based on their frequent associations with one another – to begin asking questions about common topics within the Ex-Slave Narratives.1 Because I did not have access to a topic modeling program, I had to do categorize my subjects manually.
After reading reading through a number of these excerpts, I was able to determine a number of terms that were commonly associated with aviation during this time period such as teaching, stunt, passenger, and mail. After obtaining these key words, I inserted them into a table to see if I had missed any texts that relate to careers in aviation and its problems.
Having finished this process, I was able to come to several conclusions concerning my initial research questions. To answer my first question, I found that maintaining an airplane for personal use was quite an expensive undertaking, and with the start of the Great Depression, people had less time to fly as a recreation. Additionally, the construction of airports was halted by many communities who feared planes that planes would malfunction and crash into their homes and businesses.
However, there were some occupations which pilots could hold during this period. The most common were serving as a mail carriers, passenger pilots, and flight instructors. The least common job that a pilot held was as a stuntman.
Although this project required a number of days to complete, the task would have been nearly impossible without Voyant Tools. Because this application allowed me to search for key words across my entire corpus and read closely texts relating to my subject of interest, I was able to not only learn about a subject that interested me but do it within a reasonable time frame.
