This week, we finished our research and exploration phase and actually began assembling our project, which is super exciting! Since our last update, group 2 has been focusing on developing our data visualizations for our WordPress site and uploading archival objects to our Omeka collection.
The data visualizations have been really cool, and have definitely supported our original thesis– that women’s schools would demonstrate substantially more vocal support for women’s suffrage than all men’s– or even co-ed– schools. We did the majority of our visualizations on Voyant, with each individual group member focusing on one object (typically a student newspaper issue) from a single school, and testing different visualizations. We found the Word Cloud/Cirrus, TermsBerry, and Collate tools to be especially helpful for our visualizations. Personally, I was working with Carleton’s newspaper archives, which unfortunately don’t provide access to full newspaper issues from our selected time period. So, I instead chose to combine the text of several articles I’d found relating to suffrage between 1919-1920 to see if I could find any interesting patterns or word associations. While my dataset was too limited to draw any meaningful conclusions, I did notice a strong association between women’s suffrage and this notion of ‘new world values’ in the newspapers, particularly from a Christian perspective. I’ve also noticed that women’s suffrage was commonly connected to Prohibition, both as examples of these ‘new world values,’ although my Voyant findings haven’t supported this idea yet.
In the next several days, we will be refining our visualizations, adding more objects to Omeka, and hopefully meeting on Sunday to discuss our next steps. I’m really proud of our group for our collaboration and troubleshooting thus far, and I can’t wait to complete (and present!) our final project.
