Our group (Julia, Maddy, Becca, and Angie) has chosen to develop a corpus analysis project using material from the Carletonian archives. By refining our scope to front page articles and selecting one issue per year (each one being in the same month), we hope to be able to tackle a representative sample of at least the issues on the archive site (1877-2019). We aim to identify trends in terminology and how word frequency in front page articles changes over time.
Sources
All of our data should come from the text of the front pages in the digitized Carletonians, accessible in ArcaSearch here.
Processes
Voyant will be a useful tool in our textual analysis, and Flourish or similar (e.g. RAWGraphs) will provide some extra, polished options for the data visualization. Upon some investigation, we figured that the digitized newspapers in ArcaSearch must have gone through OCR already — the archive is searchable by keyword. We hope that this means we can forego the step of running OCR on the front pages and access this data in collaboration with the college archives. We will need to create a significant stoplist to produce meaningful results — we anticipate, for example, filtering out “Carleton” as a term of interest.
Presentation
We hope to create a line graph or a series of line graphs for term frequency over time, in Google Trends fashion. We are also interested in other data visualizations that might provide a broad overview of our findings, such as word clouds. All of our presentation elements will be embedded into our website.
Timeline
- End of Week 7: Solidify final project idea and submit proposal
- End of Week 8: Split responsibilities,
- End of Week 9: Prepare, practice, and refine final presentation
- End of Week 10: Present project
Model
Personal Interests
Becca
Above all, I would really like to build up my toolset for corpus analysis. Analyzing trends across a collection of texts is a task that comes up a lot in my coursework, but I typically do it in imprecise, broad impressions (and/or time-consuming Ctrl + F keyword searches). Of all the skills that we learn in DGAH 110, this is the one I am most certain that I will use. As for the Carletonian itself, I’ve been a casual reader of the newspaper in the years that I’ve been here, but I’ve always been curious about early issues. Carleton now has such a reputation for being erudite yet relaxed that I wonder what it was like on campus when it was just erudite and tiny — can we uncover the patterns that shaped public discourse back then?
Julia
During my college search, my mom told me to read the campus newspapers of the schools I was interested in, which turned out to be great advice. The Carletonian documents pressing issues on campus, showcases students’ experiences at Carleton, and simply gives a glimpse into the personality of the college. I’m excited to see how it has changed over the years!
Angie
The Carletonian is one of the longest-running publications still present on campus! As such, it can serve as a valuable historical record of the campus community. By analyzing the Carletonian, I hope to gain more insight into how Carleton has changed over time, as well as the key issues and concerns that have shaped campus culture.
Maddy
I’m really excited to work on this project because I think text analysis is an efficient way to get a sense of a collection of texts without getting caught up in all the details of hundreds of articles. It’s nice to be able to draw conclusions about the themes and topics of a set of texts without spending the time to read all of them. Analyzing the Carletonian will allow us to see what themes have been prevalent among the student body throughout time, and I’m excited to see what patterns emerge!
I’m really excited to see how your project turns out! I think looking to see how the topics of the Carletonian have evolved is very interesting, and sure to reveal interesting things about the history of the college, and especially the topics on the forefront of Carleton’s student’s minds throughout the college’s history.
I really like reading the Carletonian and the student I make crossword puzzles with also makes the Carletonian’s crosswords. I think this will be very cool as it will help show students more about their school’s history. I am really excited to see how this turns out. It could also help students from other schools learn more about Carleton!