{"id":1542,"date":"2019-11-10T17:59:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-10T17:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=1542"},"modified":"2019-11-14T21:08:21","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T21:08:21","slug":"blog-6-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/text\/blog-6-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog 6"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Using Voyant for this skill assignment was a slightly bizarre experience for me. It required altering my research question several times and altering the conceit of my question all together. Initially my question sought to figure out how leisure and play activates impacted by the Great Depression in different parts of the country. However I didn\u2019t grasp the different layers that I needed to understand in order to properly answer that question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Considering the way that Voyent processes information, scanning through the texts that contained the word \u201cplay\u201d was not all together helpful because the context would be removed and I would need to close read through hundreds of texts. I also realized that one of my previous search terms, leisure, was only helpful when searching through the library of congress archive because it was a categorization term rather than a word that was naturally occurring in the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking for ‘fun’ in context<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With all of this information as my foundation, I chose to approach my question from a different angle and simplified my question all together. My question essentially became \u2018How did people have fun during the Great Depression\u2019. I used the words \u2018fun\u2019 and \u2018relax\u2019 and analyzed them through the context tool. This allowed me time find every instance that these words were used while also seeing the context and way in which it was used. The tools allowed me to do a quick scan of the information and in the adjoining view look at the reader view and skim through several paragraphs of the source. I found this to be more helpful than any of the visualization tools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A bulk of the sources seemed to indicate that music, jazz music in particular where popular as vehicles for fun. Then I backtracked, looked at the sound cloud, selected the word ‘music’ and was able to see its use across a multitude of sources. From that point I was then able to select specific interviews to read more closely to form my opinions and conclusions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Using Music as my search term from the word cloud<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately my my simplified question ended up with a simplified answer. For fun, most people turned towards music, jazz in particular to forget about the worries for short periods of time. Delving deeper into the sources also brings in information about which cities where predominate in the jazz scene and who was playing the music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I think there is merit to distant reading, I think my preference will always be for close reading.\u00a0“Personal recollection has a significance of its own” <\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and i think that is best understood on a singular level rather as an aggregated data point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voyant is at its most useful when being used to analyze words absent of context (key word searching, graphs, word clouds, etc) and then allowing the user to re-contextualize the information rather than attempting to superimpose any particular question on the analysis. Miriam Posner<\/a> mentions that discern significant differences among text and those difference being deemed meaningful <\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> are not the same things. Whether or not text analysis is actually helpful depends directly on information one is attempting to transform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using Voyant for this skill assignment was a slightly bizarre experience for me. It required altering my research question several times and altering the conceit of my question all together. Initially my question sought to figure out how leisure and play activates impacted by the Great Depression in different parts of the country. However I … Continue reading “Blog 6”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-1542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","tag-text-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542","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\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1542"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2769,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542\/revisions\/2769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}