Computational Text Analysis
When I first received my set of documents and topic words the first hypothesis that came to mind. These documents are based on the former slaves talking about laws set by law makers for slaveholders oppress black people free and non-free. Also about the harsh work and hardship that the slaves had to endure during captivity with all of this taking place in the south. To test this hypothesis I did a little bit of computation text analysis with the Voyant Tool to get a better understanding of what these topic words mean in the documents. First I put the most relevant topic words that would agree with my thesis into the Trends tool on Voyant and got the first graph below. After getting the graph from Voyant I took note of the similarities in the topic word in each document. I also took a look at the differences such as which documents did not have a word that all the others did have. When I noted the information from the graph I took, I then took the two documents with the most topic word frequency and the two with the least amount of topic word frequency. I will use these documents to narrow down the reading from 10 documents down to 4 so I can skim through to check my hypothesis. Before coming to a conclusion I tried using a few more tools in Voyant. The tool that really caught my interest was the context tool. This is shown in picture 2. This tool allows you to give Voyant a word(s) or phrase and it’ll give you the full sentence that comes before and after the word(s) or phrase you put in. This is useful for quick reading and helps to get context behind some of the topic words. After all of this I stand with my original hypothesis that, “These documents are based on the former slaves talking about laws set by law makers for slaveholders oppress black people free and non-free. Also about the harsh work and hardship that the slaves had to endure during captivity with all of this taking place in the south.” This became very obvious when i searched the phrase “slave law” in the context tool and notice that in every document it talked about how the law is against black people not matter what your status is. I think that my original hypothesis serves as a good base. A better hypothesis would be, “These documents are the accounts of people who has survived slavery and has the brain capacity to write about what happened to them and countless others. These accounts show clearly how the law worked against black people. Being free did not protect you from the white man and slavery is hard to escape. Also the hardships slaves and black people in general had to go through and not just black people from the south. The north was really quick to send black people they did not like back to slavery by selling them out of jails.” I think that this is better due to the depth that I was able to acquire using the Voyant tools.
