How did the hope and hard-work of everyday Americans pull us out of the Depression? I asked this question because we have been talking about how the Federal Arts Project was what really helped us out of the Great Depression but I was curious to see how much the everyday working Americans really contributed. My initial thought was that the working class was the main reason we survived the Depression. Without the working class to work all the jobs provided by the Federal Arts Project, the projects would not have succeeded. So, I believe that the sole reason America made it through the Great Depression, was because of its everyday working-class Americans. When selecting my sources, I looked for ones that talked about work and providing for their family. I searched using a few different filters. I began with words such as: work, family, living, and hard. Then choose the type of source I wanted: manuscript. I used these filters and found my ten manuscripts that I believed would help me to answer my historical question.
I am still deciding whether I like Voyant tools or not.1 When I first started using it I kept getting frustrated with it. I didn’t know how to do certain things and it was really confusing. Once I sat down, read a bit about it, and played around with it, I began to understand it more. 2 I was able to compare three documents at once which was helpful. After messing around with the program, I began to analyze the texts. When comparing the texts, I could narrow it down by searching for certain words such as: unemployed. This was helpful to search through other people’s documents that they found. After using Voyant Tools and analyzing several different texts, the conclusions I came too were equivalent to my initial ideas. I found that, in fact, it was the hard work of the Americans that fueled the Federal Arts Projects, that then pulled America out of the Great Depression. As far as text analysis goes, it was harder than I had expected. It took me a while to find sources that I could later analyze and it took a while for me to get accustomed to Voyant Tools.
Mining the Eleanor Roosevelt My Day Columns, regan008.shinyapps.io/mining_my_day/.
Miriamposner. “Miriamposner/Voyant-Workshop.” GitHub, github.com/miriamposner/voyant-workshop/blob/master/investigating-texts-with-voyant.md.
