Initially when I began this assignment, my historical question was “how did folklore and superstitions from different cultures evolve in the US?” When I first came up with the question, I was unsure how it would be answered, or even if it could be answered with the documents available. As for why I chose the topic, I have always had a fascination for stories, customs, and beliefs regarding the supernatural. When I saw the categories of folklore and superstitions in the Amercian Life History collection, I knew I had found a subject that I would enjoy diving into. This was the reason why I ultimately chose to work with my own corpus. While the other items in the class corpus covered a wide range of topics, my own corpus dealt almost exclusively with folklore and stories regarding superstitious customs and the supernatural.
My experience with Voyant Tools was interesting. Once certain keywords are added to the stopwords, the tools become potentially useful for identifying and exploring word patterns and trends. I experimented with many different features, but my favorite feature was the Cirrus one. It arranged the words in a manner that was visually engaging, with a unique arrangement and colors, as well as useful for finding trends. My second favorite feature was TermsBerry because it also arranged common words in a visually engaging manner. With TermsBerry, the words were arranged in bubbles. The third favorite feature was the Links feature. It linked various related words together in a sort of web that you could drag and move around.
As I used the different features in Voyant, I began to realize that there is an answer to my historical question, or at least a part of an answer. Unfortunately, I did not discover any information from my corpus about how folklore and superstition evolved, but I might have learned more about its place during the 1930s. Throughout the different tools I used, some of the most recurring words were ‘family’, ‘home’, and ‘mother’. This inspired me to think about the role of folklore and superstition, and I realized that folklore and superstitions are learned and passed down through family. They require a base, such as a family, in order to survive. In the text, “Southern Customs”, an example of this is given. The speaker detailed several of the superstitious remedies for illnesses that were passed down through her mother’s family1. Also in the test “Myer”, there is another example of this occurring. The speaker detailed a story told to him by his father about a strange, potentially supernatural, event that occurred to him, and he also talked about some of the superstitions that his grandfather taught him as a child2.
Through the use of Voyant tools, I came up with a new question to consider the topic of folklore and superstition with. Through the use of close reading of the texts, I discovered an answer. While I was not able to answer my original question, I was able to answer a different one. Folklore and superstitions were passed down through families, and it is through families that they survive.
