Using the text analysis tool Voyant was both helpful and confusing. When I created my own corpus I essentially used a keyword search 1 in the “American Life Histories” 2 collection. My historical question was “ How did the role of Motherhood change in the New Deal Era?” I entered the word “motherhood” in the search field and it yielded no results. So from there I tried “mother”, here I was more successful. I found around 15 documents and I decided to use them as my corpus.
From there I turned to the Voyant tool to look at our class created corpus for the Federal Writers Project collection. When I first uploaded the corpus I was just interested in playing with the word art tools.
Using Miriam Posner’s 3 tutorial was really helpful as a starting point. I especially liked the section “What the heck are we looking at?” and she was correct it is initially overwhelming. But as I continued to use the Voyant tools I understood them a little more.
I found the trends tool the most helpful. I repeated the process of using the terms “mother” and “motherhood” to investigate the documents. I found that the documents with the most mentions were the ones that I had contributed to the corpus. There were other options that I was able to look through though, just not very many. I think that in this case the corpus was just too varied in what each of us was looking for. I found that in looking for an answer to my historical question my corpus was a better fit.
As I read through them I found a somewhat surprising answer to my question. Motherhood hasn’t really changed much since the New Deal Era. Mothers seem to be the main caregivers, responsible for the children and the family in general in all the domestic type duties. They were the ones that made sure that traditions were carried on and that knowledge was passed down from previous generations. Mother’s have always been the bedrock of the family.
- Miligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order:Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010”. The Canadian Historical Review .Volume 94, Number 4, December 2013 University of Toronto Press
- Library of Congress. “American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940” .
- Posner, Miriam. “Investigating texts with Voyant” GitHub. Accessed Nov. 1, 2019. https://github.com/miriamposner/voyant-workshop/blob/master/investigating-texts-with-voyant.md
