Text analysis has been proven to help a person be able to decipher what they need from a length of text in order to help them with their current research. In this project, I used test analysis to help me research and narrow down my historical question. My historical question was, “How did the Great Depression affect outlawing in the Midwest?” and I went into this research thinking that it would be interviews discussing how outlaws would be going around and stealing goods from families who are better off or that you would see an exponential increase in theft in the Midwest but that wasn’t the case. To conduct this research, I looked at interviews conducted in the Midwest which just happened to take place in majority of Texas with an outlier of one taking place in Utah. I used search words such as “outlaw” and “Midwest” which narrowed it down a bit for me to conduct my research.
Afterwards, to conduct the test analysis I used Voyant Tools. 1 My experience with this tool was somewhat challenging as there were some features that were not functioning for a while in addition to that there were some confusing to understand as well. Over the course of me using Voyant Tools and using close reading, I was able to change my assumptions and ideas I had about what these interviews would be about. In the graph below, are the words that I saw were more important in these interviews.
I was able to see pair my close and distant reading with new keyword searches and the results showed that throughout the documents, cattle and Indians were used quite a bit as that was what the interviewee was discussing. The final conclusion I can make about my historical question is that outlawing can look differently than what we are used to talking about such as train robbing, petty crime, theft, etc. from other people when it could be as simple as American Indians trying to fight back on their territory and take what could possibly be theirs. Text analysis, distant, and close reading were all useful to me as they helped me find new paths to explore my question from a different angle.
