When beginning, my question was this: “What were the major criticisms of the FWP from the Republican side?” This, seemingly at the time, was a good question to ask. It is always interesting to ask, “well what are the counter argumetns to this?” However, I quickly came to realize that while there were going to be detractors and flaws to a government program as always. They may not be coming from the conservatives or Republican Party of the time. I had made a lapse in my knowledge and had forgotten that the Republican Party at the time had actually been going through a switch, much like the Democrat party. This error came when trying to do research for this in Voyant. Overtime I simply could not find anything that had to do with any criticism from the Republican Party.
At first in trying to find some form of criticism I first tried to limit the words that were used using the “stopwords” tool in order to narrow the search. However, ultimately my search came up with nothing. Some of the words that I black listed are what one might expect. As shown in the “before-after” image many of the original words in the first corpus needed to black listed as they were simply not useful or were redundant.
It must also be noted that when selecting the sources, I specifically choose sources that had an inherent problem. Sources that perhaps described something going wrong or something negatively. I believed that in these sources there could have been someone who was a supporter of the Republican Party and thus could have stated some negative opinion in the programs. The first 10 sources that I submitted did not “work.” Meaning that I initially thought the reason I was unable to find any Republican criticism was due to my 10 simply not having any. As a result, I created a “Final Corpus” which used some from the original ten that had negative insight and some new ones that I had not previously been exposed to.
In end, I used a distant reading method to first find some criticism on programs 1. Then, I moved into a close reading method in order to analyze that source. However, while there was some criticism in the source there was nothing to indicate it was coming from a republican ideology. Despite not finding something relating to the question I posed, without the tools of black/white listing it is likely I would not have been able to find any criticism. Due to the size of the corpus close reading would not truly bring good analysis on these sources while using close reading would not be feasible. So, by using the Voyant Tools as an in-between (to close and distant reading) I reached a goal of finding some criticism.
As I was getting ready to revise my original question in favor of a new one, I began to understand why there was no Republican criticism. The party had actually began to switch its sides just as the Democrats did. I had actually previously known about this switch but had mistakenly thought it had occurred quickly after the civil war
2. With this, by complete accident, I had uncovered something quite interesting. Perhaps the reason that I could not find much information on the Republican Party criticism was simply because there wasn’t any, at least not in this. The reason for this being is that maybe the Republican party may not have actually truly disagreed with what the Democrats were doing 3. Of course, there will always be disagreement simply for the sake of disagreement between political parties. But, due to there being little to zero Republican criticisms in these documents shows that they might not have %100 disagreed with what F.D.R was doing.
Without the Voyant Tools, none of this understanding would be possible. Distant reading was far to broad and close reading was too specific. Voyant tools helped me find an in-between point where I could both look at all the documents I had selected and analyze them.
