Blog Post 6: Unions & Text Analysis

My original historical question was, “what factors helped shift the public perception of labor unions in the 1930s, and how?” And with “public perception,” I was referring to the working class’ trust in unionization and the efficacy of unions. Initially, I assumed that labor unions were stigmatized negatively in the 1930s because of their lack of success in years prior, and that affected the willingness of the working class to unionize.¹

I selected my sources from the American Life Histories collection by refining the search with the subject of “labor unions.” The items I selected for part one were particularly interesting to me because of the passion and candor the interviewees spoke with when referring to unionization; there was actually a document that was a manuscript of a Worker’s Alliance Meeting in New York, and the entire thing was just the prayer that someone led before starting the meeting.

Voyant turned out to be really beneficial for text-analysis and helping me create a more constructive question. I utilized the class corpus by creating a new corpus with only 62 documents that involved the words “union” or “unionization.” Distant reading was useful in this aspect because it allowed me to see the frequency in which unions were talked about throughout the collection. Now that I had a corpus that was composed of manuscripts about labor unions, I wanted to see how people were talking about them.

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In the “contexts” section of the site, I was able to search “union good”~15 and “union bad”~15, and this allowed me to find sentences with the words “union” and “good” within 15 words of each other. I got a total of ten results and only 1/10 of those documents used the word “bad” to describe unions in a negative manner. The other nine documents used the word “good” to refer to unions in a positive light. After pairing my findings with close reading, I realized that the documents do not clearly and explicitly present the factors that affect the working class’ perspective on labor unions. So, my original historical question went from, “what factors helped shift the public perception of labor unions in the 1930s, and how?” to “what was the public perception of labor unions in the 1930s?”

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To conclude, the manuscripts in my close reading of the 10 documents proved to be useful in emphasizing peoples candid thoughts and passion about labor unions. But most importantly it shed light on how there were discrepancies in attitudes about unionization, that were determined primarily by your status as a working-class individual. For example, the manuscripts showed that while some people had the freedom to unionize, others were fearful of retaliation in the workplace. Also, despite reading Miriam Posner’s blogpost beforehand, I still went into this assignment thinking that Voyant would provide a “straightforward window into a text.”² But by the end of the assignment, I realized, as Posner argues, that text analysis and Voyant should instead be used “as a way to talk about how we interact with texts and what kind of meaning evades capture by computational tools.”³

1. Labor Unions During the Great Depression and New Deal, http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/depwwii/unions/
2. Miriam Posner, Investigating texts with Voyant, https://github.com/miriamposner/voyant-workshop/blob/master/investigating-texts-with-voyant.md
3. Ibid.