Module 2 proved to be interesting way to approach both past analyses of the subject matter my research is concerned with, as well as my own analyses of the thoughts conveyed in primary source materials. At first, I wondered what could be drawn from using data-related tools concerning the American Civil War in the context of foreign dimensions and Great Britain. However, the use of the Google ngram program and the data formats created through Voyant leaves me believing that such tools do have more applications to this subject field than I first thought.
Beginning with the construction of ngrams drawing upon Google’s digital book collection, my intent was to determine the frequency of certain subjects in digitized works, looking for when writing including such terms or figures was most prevalent. The first ngram I tested was to determine the general trend behind the Civil War in literature in the first place, with the inclusion of Abraham Lincoln acting as another trend for comparison. I wanted to see when authors and historians discussed the War, Lincoln, Union and Confederacy most often and draw a conclusion on what factors may have shaped rising and falling recurrence.
The second was more focused comparing the frequency of the American Civil War – as a reference to broader discussion of the subject – to that of three individuals integral to the course of diplomacy during the conflict: William Seward, Earl Russell, and Lord Lyons. The aim here was to identify trends in the inclusion of these officials and compare them to the frequency of general narratives. All appear to have decline in usage since the early-mid 20th century, a trend that aligns with what I have noticed about the range of secondary materials that study this field I’ve encountered in my research. Prominent early works on Civil War diplomacy and the role of Great Britain, while still a smaller subset of the field as a whole, are more concentrated in the roughly 60-70 years following the war’s end. There are still occasional modern publications that use them, but this has declined overtime.
Concerning the use of Voyant-Tools, I wanted to more specifically analyze a group of primary sources to determine common themes. In particular the area I was interested in for this test concerned the possibility of war between the Union and England following the Trent Affair in 1861. Using the corpus of data formed by nine letters pertaining to the events of the Affair, two formats were utilized in analyzing the authors’ thoughts on the idea of war. The first looked at the frequency of words in graph format, with war being the 2nd most used across the letters with twenty-three separate instances. The graph’s most notable trend concerning ‘war’ is seen in the four letters of Thurlow Weed over the first half of December, 1861. His letters reveal the concerns of an unofficial American diplomat over the course of this standoff and possible prelude to another war. His first raises several immediate concern about the British response, while the last included suggests that the situation is gradually cooling, reassuring Weed in his view of the situation.
The second format Voyant presents data through is by displaying a list of each instance that ‘war’ appears in throughout the letters, including some of the context provided by their surrounding text. While this context is provided, it is more of a preliminary step for analysis, as it merely identifies pertinent locations within the text being examined. For a full understanding of the context, the wider narrative of the text still needs to be read.
Ultimately, both the graph and the individual contexts have their own value to analyzing the thoughts and perspectives of the individuals writing these primary source documents. However, it remains important to read through these materials ourselves. There are details that these programs will not display in an immediately apparent manner that a look at the document itself can provide. For example, the rushed nature of Thurlow Weed’s writing in his letters on the 4th, or the serious hand in which Lord Russell communicates the preliminary British stance on Trent to Lord Lyons in the Untied States. Rather, these programs and tools can act as supplements to our own thoughts and analytical work with these writings, indicating points and areas of interest in the text for further examination.