This week’s blog post and the technical activities were both activities that I thought helped me learn a lot. In these, I got to learn about slave culture and choose how I want the direction of my discussion post. After looking at some material I thought a good research question would be : How were slaves treated based on their personal religious beliefs. The reasoning behind this discussion question is that it truly interests meow enslaved people who choose not to follow their master’s religion were treated compared to slaves who did. Also if the slaves did get punished then what were those punishments were
I understood that this question may be hard to get an answer to using voyage. However, I still thought it may be a cool way and see if any new information raised form by putting in the data. The first document I put in was the Narrative of Henry Box Brown by Henry Box and Charles Stern. The second article I used was The Light and Truth of Slavery from 1845. These were two articles in which I thought I could get some good information for my research question.
After playing around with the word frequencies I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. The voyage maps helped to show the keywords used and helped me get a quick overview. However, it was not perfect in helping me find key details that helped me answer my question. The overall voyage was a good experience. The website would be best for computers. The reasoning for that they can quickly go through a mass amount of this data and try and give people a quick overview. Then people can go in and find small details.
I am so glad to hear that you enjoyed this project and that you found text analysis to be a useful means for research! I think your question was just broad enough to enable your results to give you some insight into your research question, although I agree that it seems there were some limitations. I wonder if trying different sources would have helped the results a little more, but you gave this a solid shot. If anything, Voyant can also tell you what *is not* apparent in the source material, and from a research standpoint, that is still useful. I also appreciate your additional reflections about this process and the benefits and disadvantages of using Voyant.