My historical question was “how were crime rates influenced by the Great Depression?”. I chose this topic because I am a criminology major and figured it would be interesting to research. I assumed the answer already due to crime trends I have learned from my other classes. I assumed the answer would be that the rates increased due to high levels of poverty. As I continued researching more, however, I realized I forgot to take into account unreported/undocumented crimes, which would be most likely prevalent in this area due to the high poverty and unemployment; it would most likely become somewhat of a “norm” so to speak.
To find my sources, I used filters such as law or crime assuming that would lead me somewhere. I didn’t have a specific method in how I selected my sources. I selected ones that were different in the sense that I could have a wide variety of perspective and types of crime. I also selected ones I found interesting because I didn’t see a point in not making my research fun.
Using Voyant Tools was a bit of a challenge. The help/support page was referenced a lot. However, after my many attempts to figure it out, I did and it was actually really helpful. It helps analyze all these documents and condense the similarities among them. My favorite part was that I could control how many words were displayed in the word cloud feature. Sadly, I could not get the bubbles to work, but I did find another useful tool which was the DreamScape tool which displayed the locations of each document. I chose my own corpus to use for Voyant Tools because the zip folder on Slack was unsupported by the document selector so I was unable to upload the full class corpus to Voyant Tools. If that is an error on my end, I understand because I am not the most tech savvy person. However, I did find it useful to use my own corpus as I felt it was the most relevant to my historical question.
Performing text analysis on my corpus did not change much for me except for maybe my idea of how the crime rates were portrayed. My question also changed to be more racially centered: “Were crime reports racially biased in the Great Depression era?”. I believe crime trends were more racially targeted during the Great Depression. This can be observed using previous knowledge and relating it to the DreamScape tool which shows my corpus is based in the more southern region of the United States where racism was very prevalent. Analyzing the word cloud, the words “man” and “negro” and “court” stand out to me the most. It brings me to the conclusion that crimes were extremely racially biased in the Great Depression era.
