Introduction
For my digital humanities project, I textually analyzed Jonathan Carver’s “Travels through the Interior Parts of North America” in the years 1766, 1767 and 1768. In Voyant, I used the document’s text file to visualize and analyze trends within the corpus, with a focus on what subjects were seen where and with what connotations. While I observed interesting trends between charged language and subjects, in order to establish a relationship with greater certainty, better understanding the book’s context and content would be required.
Source
I used the text file “Carver_TravelsThroughInteriorNAmerica.txt” of Jonathan Carver’s “Travels through the Interior Parts of North America” in the years 1766, 1767 and 1768. One document with 110,315 total words and 9,794 unique word forms (according to Voyant). While I used the raw data, I was careful to only follow trends of Carver’s words through specification and not words within the document’s metadata.
Processes
After seeing the default word cloud generated by Voyant, with the twenty five most frequent words in the corpus (indians (364); great (334); lake (272); river (229); time (183) being the five most frequent), I became curious about the existence of prejudice and normative language in the text.
Because the most common language included a term for indigenous people and neutral terms for geographical features and spatial descriptors, I wondered about the context in which these terms were used. Effective documentation consists of positive statements. When examining historical documentation, human bias from the documentarian, when not identified, can create a false representation of the truth. For this reason, my next step consisted of exploring the corpus’ most frequent connotative adjectives, neutral subjects, and the contexts both were used in.
Some words I explored:
our, their, chief, power, nation, war, property, english, spirit, superior, proper, enemies, greatest
The next challenge I encountered was trends of words with multiple meanings: establishing a relationship between two words is difficult when one word is used in different meanings. Take the word “property”, for instance. At one point in the document, property is used as an attribute,“I discovered also by accident another extraordinary property in the waters of this Lake,” while shortly after is described as a possession, “The Indians in their common state are strangers to all distinction of property”. So, understanding the greater and varied contexts in which each word is used is required in order to make accurate text analysis. Which, within the confines of this midterm, time wise is not practical. For this reason and because this midterm focuses on digital humanities skills as opposed to strict humanistic inquiry, I decided to accept the limitations of my knowledge of the text and explore it using Voyant to find any interesting textual trends from my novel, but curious perspective.
Trends
Presentation
I used a WordPress subdomain to present my dh project. I chose a template with different background colors that created clear boundaries between the page’s components. I used the HTML embed option to embed the initial word cloud (my starting point) and my final exploration outcomes onto the site. My intention, inspired by Prof. Lin Winton’s presentation, was to create a project that was comprehensive and accessible.