“How did the Federal Writers Project encapsulate and preserve the American culture?”
This is the question I want to answer and the reason being is that the New Deal projects helped shape American culture, some of which has lasted to the modern era. I believed that the answer to my question would have something to do with the ex-slave narratives that were recorded for the FWP along with the artwork and theater projects that were created during that time.
In order to find the answer, I looked through the Library of Congress with the search term “Federal Writers Project” to see what basic information I could find. I was actually able to find a source or two that related to the topic of American culture. But in order to narrow down my search, I refined the search words to “Culture and Folklore.” In doing this, I was able to find more sources related to my question1.
As for my experience with “Voyant Tools2” it was slightly confusing and took a little bit to get used to. Using the tool that allowed me to see specific words in context was extremely helpful because then I could see exactly what was happening in the text. In using this tool, I looked up the words “culture” and “American.”
When using this website, I also decided to use the entire class corpus in order to widen my search results and to give me a better idea of what impact the FWP had on American culture.
After reading some of the texts that came up with “American,” I was not surprised to find the positive outlook on American culture. Americans were referred to as “hard workers” and having a “spine.” This search does make me want to tweak my question a bit and instead ask, “How did the Federal Writers Project change the way that Americans are perceived?” or “How did the FWP help create American culture?” Many of the search results seemed very opinionated and I would like to find out what specifically caused the perception of Americans to be this way.
Overall, this close reading helped me realize that the FWP helped sort of “create” American culture and instead of asking how it preserved American culture, I should be wondering how it helped create American culture. Analyzing the text helped me identify which topics are more prevalent in the corpus and what questions could be answered based on the information given. Reading and analyzing the corpus was definitely beneficial to reshaping my question and allowed me to better grasp what effect the Federal Writers Project had on America.
