{"id":1448,"date":"2019-11-08T06:33:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T06:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=1448"},"modified":"2019-11-14T20:02:54","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T20:02:54","slug":"ghost-stories-from-the-1930s-and-voyant-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/text\/ghost-stories-from-the-1930s-and-voyant-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Stories from the 1930’s and Voyant Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My historical question was \u201cIn what ways have ghost stories changed, if at all, and based on these accounts are people more or less careful around ghosts? Why?\u201d and while I was curious about the answer, I had figured that it would probably be similar to the ghost stories we tell today, although I did expect people to care about it less, which ended up being untrue from what I read. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first started looking up words, I wasn\u2019t sure if I was going to find any, but luckily there were a good number of actual ghost stories. I used words like \u201cghost\u201d \u201cspirit\u201d and \u201csupernatural\u201d with more results than I was expecting, although sometimes I\u2019d get more religious texts with \u201cspirit\u201d, or people would use phrases like \u201cpale as a ghost\u201d which was not what I was looking for. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took me a bit to really understand Voyant and which tool would work best for me. Since my topic is pretty niche, I found that the word map wasn\u2019t helpful, but that the graph and the contrast tools helped me compare my corpus with the class\u2019 to find similarities and differences <\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The amount of times the word “ghost” showed up in my corpus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The amount of times the word “ghost” showed up in the class’ corpus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What I did in this picture was I entered the word \u201cghost\u201d into both my corpus and the class\u2019 corpus to see how often the word shows up throughout texts. Most of the spikes in the class\u2019 corpus was from the stories I submitted, but there was one that was very high that I hadn\u2019t submitted. It ended up being just a sentence from an interview but because the interview was only one sentence, it made the graph think that because \u201cghost\u201d was a common word in the interview, simply because there were few other words, that means it must be relevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end I feel like my historical question doesn\u2019t fit what I found so I\u2019d change it to something more like \u201cHow common were ghost stories? How important are they to the communities their told in?\u201d because I found that they were somewhat common throughout many towns and they inspired bonding in certain stories <\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. I also found that I enjoyed looking through the different ghost stories and how they ended up being similar to the ones we tell today, despite how different the times are. One of the most interesting things I found was how the debate over whether ghosts are real or not was just as relevant then as it is now, with both skeptics and believers arguing. The biggest difference I think is how today, people mostly talk about evidence being caught on camera, and whether or not it\u2019s faked, but in the 1930\u2019s, catching a ghost on camera would be near impossible so the beliefs were based on personal experience. The conversations have shifted from personal to objective, unaltered proof, which while can be more believable, it discounts a lot of experiences that cannot be seen, such as the emotional energy tied to a place, and credible psychics, however rare they might be.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My historical question was \u201cIn what ways have ghost stories changed, if at all, and based on these accounts are people more or less careful around ghosts? Why?\u201d and while I was curious about the answer, I had figured that it would probably be similar to the ghost stories we tell today, although I did … Continue reading “Ghost Stories from the 1930’s and Voyant Tools”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2542,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions\/2542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}