What really captivates me about the past is people’s lifestyles. This desire to get a glimpse at their lives back then led me to my historical question: What were lifestyles like then, and how were they recorded by the Federal writers. I was immediately greeted by a flurry of words. The problem was that they all seemed very simple. Home and work, like and folklore. These words caused me to think a little more about what my historical question could be.
My thoughts moved on to consider World War II, so I shortened the class corpus to any document that was recorded between 1939-1945. What I learned was that our corpus stopped in the year 1941 which is when America joined the war. This date could imply that the government turned from focusing on these writings and recordings to focusing more on the war effort.
Voyant was pretty helpful in getting me to visualize these lifestyles before America joined the war. In the word cloud (Cirrus Tool) above, the words work, good, old, time, like, house and came recurred very frequently. This gave me the idea that a lot of these people’s lives were more centered around work as that was what the New Deal set out to do, provide jobs and relief for the people in this time of uncertainty. “Like” and “Old” are words very reminiscent of jargon typically used to describe locations (Old) and forming comparisons or statements of “ought to” or “should” do something. These words being prominent showed, to me, that the interviewers were most likely very relaxed when it came to discussing these topics with their interviewees. They carried the valence of narrative and really felt like stories painting the picture of family life in the past. 1
The tool that helped me the most was the Links Tool. It really put these words into perspective by showing how they connected with words in similar documents. Using this, I could closely investigate the documents to see why the algorithm assigned these certain words to link. A good example was “family.” Links linked the word with “medicine,” “home,” and “Doughty” as the Doughty document discussed their life at home. This link conveys a sense of home being a place of healing and security as that was where the family was. A similar thing could be seen with “people” being connected to “folklore” as folklore was the story of the people which they passed down, holding meaning in their culture.
Distant Reading is a really fun tool for getting a broad sense of what a group of documents could possibly mean. I enjoyed getting to explore the tools and answer my historical question. During the time before America joined the war, they were very focused on home, doing good, working to support their families and trying to keep healthy. 2
- The Doughty Family is an example of one of these families. https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh002109/
- The Introduction to the American Life Histories details how people were able to gain work and jobs through the New Deal, specifically in the Federal Writer’s Project. https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/articles-and-essays/introduction/
