Local Mining Culture and Digital Humanities Methodologies

Corpus Text Analysis

The analysis of the collection begins with an overview of the text and the overall usage of vocabulary throughout the collection. This method of study originates out of the concept of Digital Humanities, and one such focus of this field is the concept of distant reading. Distant reading allows for a larger analysis of a work or series of items. As discussed by David Oberhelman, on page 59 of his book Distant Reading, Computational Stylistics, and Corpus Linguistics: "He [Franco Moretti] changes the critical lens by rejecting the microscopic close reading of a single text and, instead, regards very large constellations of many literary works, which he describes a 'planetary system,' requiring a macroscopic approach."

This exhibit plans the same approach to the Maxwell Collection as Oberhelman discusses. Several visual aids will be used, and the first step of this exhibit is to analyze the vocabulary used as a framework for the rest of the exhibit. As such, the first graph is a word cloud, which shows the most frequently used words as larger on the cloud.



The first impact of the word cloud shows a heavy emphasis on words that orientate around Kansas and the interactions with the larger governmental officials. The documents emphasize words like "Kansas" and "union." While it may seem self-explanatory, the documents also demonstrate a trend within the words when analyzed over the course of the corpus. The usage of words changed from larger scoping words into more local words, and for a extremely important reason.


Towards the beginning (chronologically) of the collection, the focus of the vocabulary is on the word "union." It parallels with the large amounts of strikes and rebellions that were occurring during the 1919-1922 period. An excerpt from the book Strike, by Jeremy Brecher, claims that "the government and even the unions in often pitched battles involving guns, dynamite, and on one occasion a makeshift air force".

After this focus on the union, which coincides with the union strikes, the focus shifts back onto Kansas as the state in general. The usage of district shoots up quickly after "union" dies down as well, which coincides with the turn of thought from the outward union concern to the inward state concerns.

An argument can be made that this focus arose from a rejection from outwardly governmental society down onto the local level.

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