For my final project, I would like to explore the possibility of proposing a collaboration – with the current DH project Moveable: Narratives of Recovery and Place (based out of Marshall University and West Virginia) to create additional features/layers for the current iteration of their story map and archive. Moveable, a live DH interactive mapping project that chronicles personal stories of addiction and recovery in Appalachia “and beyond,” is an incredible collection of text-based first-person accounts of recovery and addiction. As powerful as the project is, it seems to stop at Appalachia, and perhaps falls short in appealing to users who want to browse the material in more flexible ways to better understand the relationship between time, place, addiction and recovery. The project is live, and currently being updated, so I am interested in exploring how to make these stories even more accessible and fluid — How can we move beyond lengthy text-based storytelling in favor of a multimedia approach without diminishing the power and sensitive nature of the project’s stories and people? How can we continue to modernize a DH tool to appeal to users with increasingly shorter attention spans?

Home | Movable: Narratives of Recovery and Place

The Movable Project: a platform for people in Appalachia and beyond to share, highlight, and document stories of recovery.

Features to propose and consider:

• Timeline – to help map and chronicle the difficult journey of recovery in time – one that often looks more like a circle, starting, stopping and restarting
• Additional Map Layer – To toggle between traditional views like city/state/country to more personal data points like breaking points, rock bottoms, moments of hope, feelings of “home,” journeys made from “beginning” to “end” and in between

I would love feedback on whether or not one can propose a collaboration or addendum to a current DH project, and how to go about creating such a proposal without necessarily critiquing such a meaningful and nuanced digital archive. I’m leaning towards focusing on one feature over the other, but not sure whether that is a worthwhile addendum to a pre-existing project, or something that should be explored in a different project altogether. I love the idea of collaborating and building off stories already shared, but not sure about the ethical considerations of expanding work already collected and created by and for a particular tool. 

This past summer, I was awarded a fellowship that allowed me to dig into the archives of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. There, I was able to utilize their physical and digital collections to build a syllabus for an Introduction to Caribbean Studies course that is currently being taught at CUNY Graduate Center. I was surrounded by old, yellow-tinted newspapers, texts in foreign languages, children’s books, comics, zines, and paper clippings that seemed important to someone once. This experience got me thinking about the history of this specialized library/museum. Much has been written about the origin of The Schomburg. Its future is constantly being built. I was interested in that question of longevity and relevance in an ever-changing world as well as the ephemerality of artists’ and writers’ work. I was also interested in the stories that never get told; the stories that never reach you and I, and why; I was interested in the people and the stories that are not considered interesting or smart enough to be told. I was interested in knowledge and people made lost, invisible, insignificant and irrelevant to whatever it is their government and academic institutions are doing and we are doing here. I was and am interested in stories untold and how to better connect them to us as a means of finding likeness and meaning in the things deemed mundane.

Another point on my interest have to do with my journey creating this Intro to Caribbean Studies syllabus. The journey was not easy but I landed on an idea being proposed in several readings that I hope to also contribute to. In my Dominican Republic and Haiti week, I came across a text that advocated for the uplift and exposure to alternative narratives about both nations’ relations to each other that was not based on academics, politicians or sensationalism. It challenged readers in the diaspora to find people, texts, and narratives that do not contribute to the hate and antagonism that is popular about these nations’ relations to each other. The point was that there are stories that we are not hearing or listening to because we aren’t asking the right people or the right questions. My proposal hopes to do this by finding people and their art and writing that is not popular, known, published; archives founds on the street, by people who are local and native to those areas and whose lives as as interesting and relevant and complex as any other and who should be heard and considered when deciding what is worthy and what is not. This, I think, is what really gets me going. And potentially having institutional support and interest in this project can make this a reality. Luckily, the Schomburg has already expressed interest but wanted a detailed plan first. This is the beginnings of that plan…

I imagined that items just arrived or were constantly being sent over digitally and simply added to the Schomburg’s archives. Of course, nothing is that simple, especially in a world almost aggressively transitioning from the texts and physical to the digital and meta and abstract. I wonder what we are losing and who are we invisibilizing further through this transition. I imagine books and archives that would never get found or taken seriously. I fear that the historical inequality that comes with the lack of resources and access will end up not only burying deeper the knowledge, information, ideas, perspectives, hopes and wishes of many folks, but also depriving us of all the genius and complexities that can be found in “undiscovered” writings and archives.

I am interested in collecting and archiving texts from Black Caribbean and Latin American folks (the African descendant citizens of the Global South) writing about, well, anything. I will use this proposal to propose to the Schomburg the creation of a job there as traveler, collector, and digital contributor as well as communication liaison between un-published and un-popular writers and The Schomburg Center. To keep this project simple, for now, I will focus on one Caribbean nation, one town, one language (Spanish) and not dive too deep into politics of identity and the publishing industry and dynamics. My focus for now would be Black-identified, Spanish speaking people from Puerto Rico’s largely Afro-descendant neighborhood of Loíza.

I am interested in visiting this town and finding out its literary culture. I would locate the libraries, museums, book shops, etc to identify spaces of institutional literary culture that I do not want to focus on. I would be looking instead for spaces outside of institutions that foster a culture of writing and reading. I will not only look online in social media platforms, but also roam the streets in search of book fairs and writing materials.

I came to this idea in Bogota, Colombia. I was very intrigued at the culture of reading that seemed so normalized and popular there. After touring the cultural centers and art institutions in the downtown area, where I also ran into a book fair with popular and published books, I stumbled into a busy street that was populated with fruit stands, toys and art displayed on carpets and blankets on the ground, and tons of books mounted on tables and spread out on the street sidewalks. I also saw many people reading these books. Many of these books seemed to be self-made manuscripts, zines and local newspapers as well as recipe books and children’s drawings. There seemed to be this localized, unofficial and un-“discovered” nature to these texts. They were all physical and there was no digital archives anywhere. This sparked my idea to elevate these books, these writers, by helping to digitize them. My interest and experiences at The Schomburg helped me narrow down my focus to Black writers writing about Black folks, for Black folks and on Blackness in general.

I wanted to feel like a contributor to The Schomburg’s collections and help bring physical books and manuscripts to their library/museum. I also wanted to write short LibGuides (Library Guides) about each item found and publish on their website.Digitally, I would be interested in creating a website where I will do multiple things. I would want to map the locations of non-institutionally represented book fairs and writers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean using a platform and software similar to ArchiveGrid. I would populate the map with the location, found material, artist bio and writing/art and contact information. The platform will also have a LibGuide section that contains summaries of the texts and where to locate and purchase them.

Part of my portfolio to present to The Schomburg director would contain grants applied to, soon to apply to and any institutional support I have confirmed. Much of this portfolio will have to contain access to funds in order to be able to cover travel, room and board, compensating people for their time, purchasing books for collection and my living expenses. I would like to receive at least $2,000 from CUNY Graduate Center as part of my Capstone Project so that I can travel and collect these items. I will not only execute this project, but also write about my experiences navigating this interest. That will hopefully be enough to receive my Masters. Before graduating, I would have applied to multiple grants and reached out to other institutions that would be interested in helping fund this project. I have Latino and Black cultural centers, museums, academic institutions and intersectional centers that would be interested in collecting and archiving Black and Spanish language books from the Global South.

Eventually, I would want to write about my experiences navigating this project and issue that I anticipate will garner some interest. Issue concerning me now but will eventually have to have their own space and conversations are as follows: identity politics; what Blackness is and what Black isn’t; who gets to be Black and write the Black experience; Latino and Blackness, the legacy of Black people and culture in Latin America; Language access and limitations; representation and justice; publishing industry, race and class, etc.

For my text analysis project, my original thought was to analyze anthropological journals over time, focusing on language and the change in terminology in Indigenous and African American experiences in the United States. I decided against it because I would ideally like to compare the change over time, roughly every decade, and that would have been too much data to analyze for a project such as this. Instead, I began to think about what kind of corpus might be available that would be interesting to me for my interest in New York studies.

I decide to plug in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Voyant. A popular poet from the mid 19^th century in New York, Whitman is known for being a humanist, a transcendentalist, open about sexuality, and opposed to slavery. I was curious to see the population of word usage in Leaves of Grass, to see if there was any correlation between his known persona and his poetic voice.

With a total of 39,923 words and minor edits to the stop list to add words such as “oh,” “ere,” “shall,” and “thou” a really interesting cirrus was created.

From this visual, there is evidence of the poetic nature of the corpus with words such as “earth,” “love,” “soul,” “death,” “hand,” and “sea.” Here is a breakdown of the top 75 words by word count:

Whitman’s choice of words shows that he focuses on the ‘human body’, ‘nature’, and ‘time’ the most in his poetry. Less common themes in Leaves of Grass are ‘place’ and ‘society’ or ‘politics’. That is not to say he doesn’t discuss politics or social functions, but probably uses nature as a metaphor for discussing what was going on during his lifetime. The present theme of ‘time’ is interesting because it shows how he must have been sensitive to death and dying.

When I saw that “man,” “great,” and “earth,” were the three most common words used, I thought it would be interesting to compare his works with a female poet from New York at approximately the same time as Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass.

I came across Julia Ward Howe, a poet I’m unfamiliar with, who is also from New York and released a book of poetry titled Passion-Flowers in 1854. I chose Howe because like Whitman, she also was an abolitionist, as well as an avid social activist and women suffragist. My expectations based off the title of her book of poetry and her background would be that “women/women” would be a top count word and that there would also be a common theme of nature present.

With a total of 22,932 words and after editing the stop words “such as ‘thine,” “like,” “thought,” “let,” “know,” and “gave,” the following cirrus was created.

Unlike my expectations, Howe’s top theme seemed to be ’emotions’ and the ‘human body’. Oddly, “rome” was the 6^th most present word, appearing 42 times. To find out why, I ticked off the first 6 terms so I can see when “rome” appeared in the text on the trends graphic.

This graphic shows that Rome appears quite frequently in the first half of the book. So I went back to the book and when I looked at the contents I noticed the titles of the section referenced Rome and Italy.

I dug a little deeper and came across a summary of Passion-Flowers that explains the use of ‘Rome’:

“Passion-Flowers is a book of forty-four poems, arranged to tell the story of a poet-pilgrim’s spiritual and aesthetic quest during a time in Rome. Julia had been thinking of herself as a pilgrim for many years. While the title of the book might allude to the flower symbolic of the passion of Jesus, it is also tauntingly ambiguous. The passion-flower is never specifically mentioned in the poems, although many other flowers are named, especially roses. The word passion appears in the book in romantic and sexual contexts.

Julia would claim that the book was about the revolutionary political events of 1848, plus slavery and religion. These are not, however, the themes that stand out and shock most readers. The first-person voice of the poems is that of a woman poet or artist confessing her ambition and her unhappiness.”

(https://erenow.net/biographies/the-civil-wars-of-julia-ward-howe-a-biography/7.php)

By looking at the top 75 words by word count from Howe’s book of poetry, it is made clear that an air of feminism and religion are at the heart of her storytelling, as justified by the summary above.

While I’m not a DH student, I think I’d really like to go with the proposal option and curate it as a DH grant/award proposal. What comes to my mind is the NYCDH Graduate Student Project Award which may not be available next semester (which is my last at the GC) for my thesis capstone, but is great practice for other potential grants or awards. I’d like to continue with a project that I used for my map praxis assignment, which is the development of a future non-profit titled Northern Slavery Collective.

About the Northern Slavery Collective (NorSC)

In February 2020, staff from various museums gathered at Philipsburg Manor, New York to discuss how they are rethinking their current narratives to create inclusivity by including stories of enslaved and free peoples who lived and worked on these properties.

This network of like-minded institutions has acted as a space to work through the challenges of the interpretation of inclusive narratives. In the summer of 2021, this group created the Northern Slavery Collective, which has currently manifested as a Facebook Group and Page for the cohort to collectively share ideas, events, questions, and challenges of this interpretation process.

The organization is in its early stages, which is hoping to expand publicly through a website and social media as a resource to the public and educational communities for understanding and learning about these forgotten stories. The public facing goal is to end the myth that slavery did not exist in the North or was mild in comparison to slavery in the South.

ABOUT section from Norsc Storymaps

My DH project for NorSC

With NorSC, I’m hoping to develop a cohesive mission that supports historical sites and institutions to share the knowledge of enslaved African experiences in the Northeast. The project will be a website that functions as a source for the general public, educators/academics, and the staff/employees of these sites. Each audience will utilize the website in a different way that has DH components throughout.

The General Public

To educate the general public, the website would feature sections including general history of slavery in the Northeast, history at each site, and virtual content, including exhibitions and videos. Each site can be explored using an interactive map that will give basic features, and can be clicked to open a new page with more details. The virtual content can also incorporate Omeka to feature exhibitions and collections.

Educators/Academics

For educators and academics, there will be open access workshops, resources, syllabi, and other materials and packets that can be used for educational purposes. Again, a map feature can be used here to feature educational materials that are provide by site. I haven’t fully thought out how all the downloadable material will be stored or accessed, but this could also have some sort of DH component. In addition, presentations can be accessed from the website (not downloaded), and things like Timeline JS can also be helpful in digital education.

Staff/Employees

Staff and employees of these sites can login and access a forum to share knowledge with one another. The forum can be used as a space to collaborate on projects, share events, ask for feedback, support each others work, and so much more. The main goal would be to provide as a space to easily communicate and network with one another on exploring, discussing, and learning ways to exhibit and educate an inclusive history. I have’t fully figured out what kind of DH component would work here, but am open to any feedback, as well as feedback for this project as a whole!

I’m proposing the creation of a digital archive for textual and visual material related to mainframe computers. As a part of the curation process, we will perform glitches or additional manipulations of the material as a method interrogate the assumptions we have about business computing and mainframe computers.

Both minicomputers and super computers are well understood in academia. Digital humanities emerged in a period when computing costs dropped precipitously through innovations related to the microprocessor. Scientific computing relied on supercomputers addressed on complex mathematical calculations. Although its birth place can be traced to the academy, mainframe computers mostly found application in business contexts. Given its pedigree, mainframe computing is an under explored topic in digital humanities. Yet concepts made popular by mainframe computing live on in today’s software infrastructure in the form of batch processing, multitenancy in systems, timesharing of compute / storage resources and transactional databases. The age of Big Iron also continued the contribution of women to information technology often made less visible than those made by men. For example, the theory of machine-independent programming languages and the creation of FLOW-MATIC language by Grace Hopper, which was extended as COBOL, the principal program language used program mainframe computers.

This project will handle subject matter germane to the many facets and specters of digital humanities. Using frameworks like Wax from the minimal computing group ensures some longevity of the archive in question. Mainframe computers continue to power the majority of credit card transaction processing. The prominence of this type of hardware in governmental payment process came to light when stimulus checks weren’t issued in a timely manner during the pandemic. Maintenance (or lack thereof) of our critical technology is a major concern of digital infrastructure scholarship. Historical research will be critical to reconstruct a cultural particularities of time and place. It would also be advisable to

I am also keen on inviting collaborators with different skill sets. Some may want to work through the issue of cataloging, while others write essays explaining how mainframes function, what work they do or what the outputs are like. If we want to take a deformative approach to the archive, we could have someone coming from a design perspective (Adobe tools, PhotoMosh), another from an informed naif (data bending with Audacity/converted text file), while a third collaborator could deploy an algorithmic approach (software libraries like glitch-this or pixelsort). Regardless of how we approach the archive, I expect curation and critical writing will be instrumental in guiding audiences through the material.

Grant writing is always a tedious process. I’ve been able to learn about this process through my job at a historical house non-profit. As a small institution, we are grateful for being eligible for small-business grants, but sadly miss out on the bigger ones (typically government funders) can often be monetarily larger. Our Director of Development and Community Engagement is our grant writer and since I work closely with her, I’m able to gain some experience in assisting with the grant writing process. We recently received our first government grant and are also currently writing a proposal for NEH. Oddly, this NEH grant is very specifically NOT Digital Humanities. As we are slowly coming out of the pandemic, NEH is looking to fund institutions for in-person humanities projects.

From this experience and with the reading for this week there are a few things I’ve learned about NEH grants.

1. NEH grants are very time consuming! They contain a lot of components, with multiple sections that can be at least 10 pages (single space) long each. Not only that, NEH looks for academic writing, where most other grant-giving institutions prefer a conversational tone.
2. They are thorough! Having multiple components will make you (the person or institution writing the grant) stronger. These can include project format, resources, history, project leaders, and of course, a detailed budget.
3. They are a great skill to learn! Grant writing is very useful and can be beneficial in many job positions, whether you will be writing grants or not. For our class, it’s great for grad students to get funding for their academic projects.

Grant Tracking Resources

Grant writing requires a lot of time and organization. There are many applications out there to stay organized, such as Grant Hub or Airtable. You can also create a spreadsheet to help stay on task.

Maintain Significance

The posts we read about for today’s class were very informative. Even though at my work we are not currently working on a DH grant, there is still a lot I’ve learned that I can share with my team to help stay on track. One of the things that sticks out the most from the readings was keeping in mind the significance of your project and the criteria for each section.

It is helpful to continue to reference these steps to make sure you don’t lose sight of the project’s needs and significance and what makes you stand out from the rest of the applicants.

After researching proper methods in text analysis and text mining, a new concept for a Digital Humanities grad student like myself, I decided to retire my original idea of using text mining to make the claim that Calpurnica, the Finch family’s maid, from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, should be considered more of the voice of reason in the literature’s narrative than the Atticus Finch, the narrator’s father. This idea is to be best used for another type of project in the near future. Instead, I decided to refocus and research the difference in text between the Teen Vogue magazine issues of pre-2020 to the Teen Vogue magazine issues of 2021. Teen Vogue magazine, at its core, is a publication dedicated to expose a younger audience to a worldwide view of fashion, celebrity news, health, and artistry. Of course, generational differences come into play as well as with the magazine also including technology advances, major current events, inclusivity, psychology, fashion, and trends in the teenage world.  I wanted to see if this new political stance that the current 2021 Teen Vogue had a stark difference or connection to previous Teen Vogues of the past.

Finding pre-2020 Teen Vogue digital archived publications was a bit difficult. Although there were bountiful technological resources in pre-2020, archiving print publications into a digital platform wasn’t a common phenomenon to procure for future findings in research. I did manage to find a few archived pre-2020 Teen Vogue publications that were digitally archived. These 2011 Teen Vogue issues, however, contained no real focus on politics or injustice, as 2021 Teen Vogue. Instead the focus is rather on celebrities, fashion, make-up, dating and horoscopes. The pre-2020 issues are also not as inclusive in exposure and narratives in regards to celebrities, makeup and fashion representing more white figures.

Combing through a few online published articles from Teen Vogue’s 2021 issues was easily accessible. The focus had shifted, significantly, to reflect current events, in a very strong approach to inform the readers of injustice in politics. Teen Vogue’s online archive was well organized and detailed. I used Voyant to help organize and clarify my data to come to this conclusion.  I focused on a few current 2020-2021 articles, with most varying from politics, the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic, and inclusive narratives ranging from race, culture, sex and identity in addition to fashion, celebrity, health and dating.

In addition to the text mining process, I did some outside research on the range of change with the new scope of publications and current events to find a huge conflict of interest in this new change of direction. This new change of direction stems from a major Public Relations crisis resolution, from Teen Vogue Magazine team, taking charge of the narrative of the magazine after the former editor in 2020 published inappropriate and racists tweets on Twitter. This discovery has led my own conclusion in a different direction comparing Teen Vogue of pre-2020 to Teen Vogue of 2020-2021 with this addition pre-text of the firing of Teen Vogue’s editor over racist remarks, seeing that instead of just adding a political aspect to their editorial, Teen Vogue Magazine has now added an inclusive narrative, ranging from not only it’s topics that to relate and educate a broader audience, but also it’s own writers, contributors and subjects, to stand in solidarity, understanding , and pride with their wide-range of young readers around the world. This differs very much from the pre-2020 narratives of Teen Vogue Magazine, that did not press upon any of these subject matters in regards to inclusion.

Below or some links to some archived pre-2020 Teen Vogue Magazine Articles:

Below are archived links to recent articles of the current 2021 Teen Vogue Magazine archive:

A look at conjunto music lyrics through a text analysis lens.

Some background

Before diving into the focus of my project, I thought it important to provide some context surrounding the project topic. First, I should probably answer, what is conjunto music? While my project initially aimed to address this question, I found that further development of the project is needed to provide a clearer definition to my audience. So, I share with you a description of the music from the organization that I currently work with:

“Conjunto — the traditional music of South Texas — dates back to the end of the 19th century. European settlers moved into the area with their button accordions and began ‘making music’ with Mexican settlers who favored the bajo sexto (a lower sixth bass guitar traditionally used in Norteño music). The results were magical, and became the signature sound of South Texas — particularly San Antonio.”

Conjunto Heritage Taller

The Corpus

Compiling a body of text was one of the most difficult and timely steps in this process. Because conjunto music has widely been taught and passed down via storytelling methods and performed “by ear,” there are many elements of the music that are not widely known or available, especially in digital formats — including lyrics. So, I spent much of the early process for this project performing online searches and collecting transcriptions and lyrics. To my surprise, I compiled a list of 54 songs — more than I thought I would be able to find considering the short window of time I had to do so. While this gave me a decent “bag of words” to work with, I hope to eventually develop this project with several more songs.

The sources were entirely web-based, consisting mostly of the “lyrics” provided directly on Google’s Search result page, but not all song lyrics were available in the first Google search. For quite a few songs, I had to dig deeper into websites such as Genius.com and Musixmatch.com or online forums, where conjunto fans provided the lyrics.

Disclaimers:

• All lyrics/text used in the project are in Spanish – Conjunto song lyrics are often in Spanish, with a few English versions, but I used songs with Spanish lyrics only, for a fair comparison (there would be much more Spanish lyrics than English ones – this would produce inaccurate outcomes)
  • Many popular conjunto songs are instrumental – this project explores conjunto songs with lyrics that have been transcribed and are available online.

Methodology

• Prepare text – I wanted to use Python or R for data prep/cleaning and then load the corpus into Tableau, but I ultimately decided to use Voyant for data prep and cleaning due to time constraints + my beginner level skills with R and Python.
• Specify Stop words – common stop words with no particular meaning, including articles, were removed from the analysis so that the words analyzed were meaningful. Below is a list of some of the stop words:

a, al, la, el, ella, el, yo, tu, he, etc.

Experience/Reflection

The focus of this project is to provide a high level overview of conjunto song lyrics, revealing underlying sentiments and themes, with the primary audience being people who are new to the genre and seeking insight on the style and history of this genre. After exploring the corpus with Voyant’s capabilities, though, I discovered that a deeper sentiment analysis and some form of time-series analysis might be required for the particular end-goals I had in mind (more on this later). With that said, I thought Voyant had some powerful features for other high-level exploration.

After specifying stop words, I was able to produce the above Cirrus visualization and term table, revealing the most frequently used terms in the corpus. Most of the top 10 terms may appear seemingly “positive” (sentiment) — translating to “love”, “life”, “desire”, “heart”, “man”, “soul”, “look”, “joy”, “angel”, “God” — however, in many of the songs within the corpus, the sentiment is actually “negative”, surrounding themes of heartache. While this visualization is interesting, more context is needed to provide a more accurate representation to people who are not familiar with the music.

The below collocate table to the right does a slightly better job at revealing more accurate sentiments and themes. Outlining terms that frequently appear in proximity of each other within the body of text gives a bit of context, in some cases, allowing for more accurate interpretation. For example, pairs #2 (“angel”, “return it/give back”) and #9 (“love”, “ungrateful”) might reveal some sense of negativity to users. This was probably my favorite Voyant feature, but still not quite accurate for a true sentiment analysis. Again, more context is needed.

Voyant seems to offer a type of sentiment analysis feature, allowing analysts/users to specify “positive” and “negative” categories, and while I was initially excited to use this feature, I quickly realized this too would require more context in order to avoid mis-categorizations and misleading my audience.

Ultimately, it seems as though any form of accurate sentiment analysis is not possible when treating each word within the corpus as just that — a single word, with no context. Perhaps other text analysis tools are capable of approaching sentiment analysis with phrases and context parameters for better results…

Other positives:

• Excellent handling of different language grammar – made it super easy to work with accent marks in my corpus, something I initially struggled with when trying to format my text for use in Python.
  • The idea behind the DreamScape feature is super cool (mapping the geographic references within the corpus to an actual map for visualization) but it has its drawbacks/quirks – many locations referenced within the corpus were not mapped, such as Tijuana, Minnesota, and Louisiana. If this were more accurate, it could be very insightful to people wanting to learn more about the roots of conjunto music, which are tied to South Texas and Mexico.

Other issues not related to Voyant:

• Inconsistencies in the use of accents (some transcriptions used accents while others didn’t)
• Small corpus – while I compiled a corpus of 54 songs, the wordcount was less than 8,000 after specifying stop words. I hope to continue this project, eventually compiling a much larger corpus.

Further Developments:

Aside from continuing to compile and clean a larger corpus for this, I think Voyant’s “Trends” timeline/line graph, could be very insightful in revealing trends and/or changes in conjunto music lyrics over time. Of course, this would also require organizing the songs in chronological order (which would likely prove to be yet another major issue considering the absence of proper documentation and details regarding these songs online), but something for organizations like mine to think about. Currently, the below line graph of “Trends” reveals nothing in terms of timespan because the songs are in random order (basically, in order of my search for them, which had no strategic approach other than the goal of finding lyrics).

Origin of the Assignment

With my natural gravitation towards studying what is not traditionally studied, I delved into the world of adolescent mementos in the form of Autograph Albums and Yearbooks. 

I came across an old Autograph Book filled with quotes and messages to a “real swell girl” living in 1940’s upstate New York. Autograph Books date back to the 16th century and eventually became outdated by the 1970s with yearbooks. I was really taken by the difference in language between early 19th century teenagers and my own youth and even the present day. Far different from “H.A.G.S.” (have a good summer) messages the albums included life advice, hopes for the future, quotes, poems, and other messages from classmates. 

Autograph album of Betty Jean Clarke of Clinton, New  York

“Best wishes to you for  alife of happiness, success and the realization of your ambitions”

“Yours till the sand of the desert grow cold, And the leaves of the judgement book unfold. 

P.S. Lots of Luck and Happiness”

But I was also taken by such clout mixed with sentimentality at the critical age when seniors are simultaneously closing the chapter of their childhood and beginning their early adulthood. It is both a time of mourning, nostalgia and one of hope. A moment shining with opportunity and devoid of regret. 

Why Yearbooks?

I set out to cast a net through teenage ephemera to observe the changes in the past century in the  way youth communicate about their beliefs and values in the past and the future. I also selected a list of years that have been reported by historians as being difficult including: 1918, 1929, 1941, 1962, 1968, 2001, and 2020. 

I approached the project as both an exploration, but also as an experiment seeking to test my hypothesis. My methodology was aimed at reducing as many confounding variables as possible and providing as much data to abstract statistical relevance.

I opted for yearbooks instead of the richer text of autograph albums for the following reasons:

1. Controlled sample
   1. Yearbooks follow the same format and have not changed. They are relatively the same across state lines, districts, time and advances in technology (we still follow the same format in 2020 as 1920. 
   2. Age of “authors” are consistent – they are all teenagers
   3. Confounding variables such as location, socio-economic class, and gender could be better controlled due to the large sample available. For this project yearbooks from the same co-ed school were used.

2. Accessibility
   1. Yearbooks have been scanned by ancestry.com or classmate.com websites
   2. Available in .txt formats
   3. Common item know by most people

3. Of note
   1. Yearbooks have a narrative structure with a clear publishing date 
   2. Public documents, not personal items
   3. A commercialized industry with set standards and formats
   4. Not typically studied 

Tools

• InternetArchive.org website
• Voyant 
• LIWC – Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count
• SPSS

Sample

• Malden High School located in Malden, Massachusets was selected as the sample as there was a consistent record of yearbooks dating back to 1919. Other schools were eliminated as they did not have co-ed classes in earlier years. Years in the 1920s had 2 books per year titled A and B.

Methods

• 105 yearbooks dating from 1919 – 2015 were downloaded as txt files. 
• Voyant platform was used to analyze the documents
• A list of stop words was created to exclude common words “Street”, proper names “John”, and clean out text from computer scanning like “pxl”. 
• The most prominent 300 Corpus Terms were downloaded and categorized in the LIWC dictionary 
• The full text of all 105 yearbooks were also processed through the LIWC platform
• In SPSS Yearbooks from the years 1919, 1929, 1941, 1968, and 2001 were marked as critical years and Yearbooks published in 1920, 1930, 1941, 1969, and 2002 were also coded after and Yearbooks published in 1918, 1929, 1941, 1967, and 2000 were coded as year before critical year. 
• Preliminary SPSS tests were used to compare LIWC scores between critical years and years immediately proceeding and following.

Preliminary Results

Cirrus Word Cloud of top terms across yearbooks

“Future” and “Past” terms throughout Years. Overall the term “Future” is used more than the “Past” for most years.

Overall yearbook text has more language associated with the past than the future. 

Across all yearbooks, LIWC analysis found that positively associated text was more common than negative associated text. 

Of the negative emotions, sadness was more prominent than words associated with anxiety or anger.

A comparison of texts in critical years did not show a statistically significance difference in future or past-oriented text when compared to non-critical years. However, a comparison of all LIWC variables found a significant difference between words associated with feelings and death between critical and non-critical years. 

Conclusion 

Additional analysis utilized grouping terms would provide additional insight in the relationship between cognitive states as categorized in LIWC between yearbook years. Further development of a measure of “critical years” is also needed. 

Other steps for this dataset would include combining the files for years in the 1920’s that were split in A and B yearbooks. Also, expanding the pool to other schools would allow for a more diverse dataset and allow for comparison between schools. Similarly comparing the popularity of words using Ngram may provide an additional frame of reference.