My historical question was “How did unemployment affect the people and writers of America during the Great Depression?”. This question came to me because I thought of the economic struggles that people faced during the Great Depression and then wondered about how it affected those people both socially and within their families. I had assumed that the families of America struggled to make ends meet and this forced them have dreary and downtrodden lives. I had also assumed that the writers of America would turn the pen and paper to deal with their struggles and would result in many writings about such struggles. As stated in the American Yawp chapter on the Great Depression, many families lost their jobs and subsequently their incomes with forced them into places such as ‘Hoovervilles’. 1 I selected my sources by looking for text that related to money or unemployment. I searched for the terms; money, unemployment, struggles, jobs, and family.
I found the Voyant Tool to be slightly confusing and overwhelming as it takes a large number of files and words and visualizes them in many different ways. It took a little bit to understand what I was looking at. The Voyant website states that the tools are meant to portray text in new visualizing ways that help a reader look at the text differently. I believe in the end it did help me with that. 2 I found the visualizations of the more commonly used words in the texts like the cirrus and links tools, which I have attached below as my two visualizations, to be the most useful in understanding what the text was telling me. They showed how the interviews had a common theme throughout with topics like their struggles and how life changed. It showed that all these people were affected by the Great Depression. I fumbled around with the other tools present but I struggled to find any significant meaning from those which is why I chose the ones I did.
Uploading the corpus showed me that unemployment did affect families and writers in their wallets, but it also had significant impact on their social lives and mental health. These were no topics I considered when first constructing my historical question. Pairing the findings help me paint a larger picture of the effect of the Great Depression on the American people, not just with what little ideas I had constructed before the close reading.
I concluded that my historical question was narrow in that it didn’t take into account the other problems that faced people and specifically writers during the Great Depression. I also concluded that distant reading helps with taking a large number of texts and analyzing them across the board and understanding them better.
