{"id":1385,"date":"2019-11-08T03:54:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T03:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=1385"},"modified":"2019-11-28T21:53:54","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T21:53:54","slug":"unionsandvoyant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/text\/unionsandvoyant\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post 6: Unions & Text Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My original historical question was, \u201cwhat factors helped shift the public perception of labor unions in the 1930s, and how?\u201d And with “public perception,” I was referring to the working class’ trust in unionization and the efficacy of unions. Initially, I assumed that labor unions were stigmatized negatively in the 1930s because of their lack of success in years prior, and that affected the willingness of the working class to unionize.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I selected my sources from the American Life Histories collection by refining the search with the subject of \u201clabor unions.\u201d The items I selected for part one were particularly interesting to me because of the passion and candor the interviewees spoke with when referring to unionization; there was actually a document<\/a> that was a manuscript of a Worker\u2019s Alliance Meeting in New York, and the entire thing was just the prayer that someone led before starting the meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voyant turned out to be really beneficial for text-analysis and helping me create a more constructive question. I utilized the class corpus by creating a new corpus with only 62 documents that involved the words \u201cunion\u201d or \u201cunionization.\u201d Distant reading was useful in this aspect because it allowed me to see the frequency in which unions were talked about throughout the collection. Now that I had a corpus that was composed of manuscripts about labor unions, I wanted to see how people were talking about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n