My historical question was, “How did the Great Depression impact farmers in Florida?”. I was for sure expecting to find texts in the “American Life Histories” collection related to Florida and farming. I assumed that I will be able to read scripts from interviews of farmer’s life and working conditions during the Great Depression.
Of course, I first made sure that my research was within the collection. Then I filtered my research by state, and input “Florida”. There were only a few texts related to Florida which made it easy to read through and pick the texts I wanted for my corpus.
I had the chance to use a software called “Voyant Tools”. This is a great solution to analyze huge amounts of data and practice distant reading. It is also great to correlate with close reading thanks to the tools offered on the platform.
I believe that Cirrus tool was the most useful one. It allows me to see the most used words in the corpus. You can also add stop words to delete from it, analyze any words you do not wish to see, and leave space for others which might be more important.
WordTree is a great tool too. Indeed, it highlights different words and also gives a notion of hierarchy between the words.
I first decided to upload the entire corpus. Cirrus tool (see below) gave a huge diversity of words. I had to use the tool Terms. I went back to close reading and picked few words to put in the search bar of Cirrus Show Terms. The most relevant words were: Farm (x591), and Farming (x64); Life*(x749) and Work* (x2773); Child* (x641) and Family* (x616). We can see that the stories are more about the life at the farm than farming. Stories talk about the life of people, their work, and family. The distant reading confirms the trend I noticed from my close reading.
The first analyzation is not enough to bring any answers to my historical question. Because I focus on Florida, I decided to reduce the corpus to all texts from Florida. It is a corpus of 42 documents (as opposed to 323 documents before).
I used Cirrus tool (see below) but added the following stop words: resource, congress, www.loc.gov, http, library, got. The word Florida shows up and this is reassuring. The analysis is working. The following important words appeared: work, good, home, Florida, mother, house, children, people, school, home. They are all related to my historical question.
Using the tool Terms, I compared the Florida corpus within the entire corpus using a proportion scale for each interesting word: Work (22%), Child (26%), Family (25%), Farm (38%), and Farming (44%).
The word “farm” is in a proportion of 38% within the Florida corpus out of the entire corpus. This only means that texts related to farming and farm within the entire corpus are mostly from the Florida texts.
There is definitely a trend for family, child, and work.
Then I ran WordTree (see below). The following words are organized around the word good: farm, strawberry, time, farmer.
“Good” seems to lead to a positive atmosphere related to the farm, the time spent, the life of the farmer, and surprisingly strawberries. It is confirmed by close reading, “as it is, we have good land and good health, plenty of good wholesome food, a roof over our heads, and good children” 1
I was expecting to get a deep understanding of the working conditions of farmers in Florida and a description of their work. Nevertheless, Benjamin Botkin said that he wanted to move “the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.” In other words, we are looking at the everyday life of people. The text analysis reflects it. We are actually not looking at their working conditions but at their own life, feelings, and what later on they believed was relevant to share from this period with the interviewer.
I paired my findings with close readings in order to understand why certain words would come up more than others. I also picked words from close reading to inject them in Voyant to see where it would lead my research.
After using Voyant Tools, I understood that I should modify my historical question. I did not find any useful information around farming within the collection. I should instead focus on “how the life of Florida people was impacted by the Great Depression?”.
Text analysis is important for digital historians in order to better understand the past. It is essential to pair distant and close readings. Indeed, using one or the other alone could lead to non-sense. I found interesting to cross data and come up with an interpretation to answer my historical question.
