{"id":1556,"date":"2019-11-11T16:23:57","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T16:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=1556"},"modified":"2019-11-14T21:18:11","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T21:18:11","slug":"skill-assignment-5-text-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/text\/skill-assignment-5-text-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"Skill assignment 5- Text Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For my text analysis project, I decided to use my own collection of ten documents, and compare it against the class corpus. My historical question is “What was the experience of working women like in New York City during the 1930’s, and how was their employment affected by the economic downturn?” The role of women in the economy has always been very interesting to me, especially women in the workforce in the early twentieth century. It wasn’t common for middle and upper class women to be employed, and it was extremely rare to see a woman in a public sort of job, like a doctor, or a reporter. I wanted to see if I could find a spread of interviews with working class women, in order to get a better idea of the jobs they had before the stock market crash, and how their careers changed as the depression continued. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A photo we talked about in class that really piqued my interest in this topic was the Migrant Mother with her children. Even though I narrowed my search down to specifically women from New York City, the female farmers who fled the Midwest during the dust bowl also had the unique experience of having to completely change their lives, and their livelihoods. Dorothea Lange wrote about her interaction with the woman in the photo’s, and it reminded me of the interviews that the Federal Writers Project conducted all over the country. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.”<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My corpus focused on my own question, so the cirrus word cloud was different for my corpus was different than the class corpus. However, it was not nearly as different as I thought it would be. The word “man” appears in the class corpus 1220 times. The word “woman” does not appear enough times to even be included in the cirrus. The same is said for my own cirrus, the word woman is not included in the word cloud. I found this very strange since all of my documents were interviews with working women in New York City. When I went back and read my interviews, I found that the word woman hardly appeared and instead the subjects were just referred to as “Mrs” or by their first names. One woman in my corpus documents was only referred to as Big Bess, and she had been prostituting herself out of her apartment prior to the depression. A surprising statement from the interviewer was included in the interview, and it’s only surprising because of the language used. “Women of minority races and economically bankrupt groups have always been exploited by materially stronger groups.” <\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> That sounds like a sentence right out of a 2019 text analysis, rather than a statement by an interviewer in 1938. Big Bess no longer wanted to work as a prostitute by the time of this interview, but felt stuck. “I’m getting sick and tired of this life, but what can I do? I don’t know any other kind of work and even if I did, where would I find it? Besides, once you get accustomed to seventy-five or a hundred dollars a week, it’s pretty hard trying to get by on fifteen or eighteen.”<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because my corpus was tailored to my specific question, I wasn’t able to find much information in the class corpus that pertained to my inquiries. This showed me that even if you have a large spread of information, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s useful to you specifically. Voyant helped me to locate different terms, but in the end the information the terms were attached to didn’t really help me too much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The cirrus for my own corpus of 10 documents.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The cirrus for the class corpus of 322 documents. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my text analysis project, I decided to use my own collection of ten documents, and compare it against the class corpus. My historical question is “What was the experience of working women like in New York City during the 1930’s, and how was their employment affected by the economic downturn?” The role of women … Continue reading “Skill assignment 5- Text Analysis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","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\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1571,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions\/1571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}