This class day will be devoted to our first in-class DH experience. We will use Voyant Tools to analyze text from the early years of The Crisis. Founded by in 1910, The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W.E.B DuBois was the founding editor, serving from 1910 to 1934, and used the magazine to advocate for social justice and promote Black literature, poetry, and art.
Zip folder of issues from The Crisis
Aims of The Crisis project
Through The Crisis: Analyzing Text at Scale, students will gain:
- Experience with text analysis as method
- Exposure to Voyant as a tool and to experimentation with a tool and critique of a tool
- Practice thinking through the research process and developing a research question
- Experience working with unstructured data
To do before class
- Explore The Crisis through the Modernist Journals Project
- Try out the different viewing options
- Choose one or two issues and read a bit
- Consider these discussion questions:
- What types of writing/materials are in the issues?
Editorial, poetry, ads, etc?
- How are the issues structured?
Lots of text? Lots of images? Like a magazine? Like a newspaper?
- What does it remind you of? Anything you know of or read that’s similar in terms of content/structure?
- What types of writing/materials are in the issues?
- Paste a screenshot of your favorite find in the Modernist Journals Project in #class-discussion and explain what interests you about it and why you wanted to share it.
Readings due
- Dzanouni, Lamia, Hélène L. Dantec-Lowry, and Claire Parfait. “From One Crisis to the Other: History and Literature in the Crisis from 1910 to the Early 1920s.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 47.
- Rambsy, Kenton. “Text-Mining Short Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright Using Voyant Tools.” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 3, 2016, pp. 251–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325917. [Available through MSU Libraries]