The purpose of this project is to analyze letters written during war, both in raw data form (personal handwritten letter collections) and letters which have been published in media form (books). My theory on this analysis is that published letters, compared to unpublished letters, in a word cloud form will vary greatly. Published letters will most likely exhibit words connected to the battlefield, where as unpublished letters will exhibit words connected to the home front. This is my projection of anticipated findings. Published letters can in fact be associated with a possible agenda, perhaps propaganda. I believe that the true message of what men spoke about during war lies in analyzing the unpublished letters , as this will most likely be what soldiers actually were thinking during war.
This first word cloud was made from the published volume "War Letters of a Public-School Boy Paul Jones." The book was styled as a memoir containing three separate chapters of letters written during the First World War and published by his father after his death. Jones was a Scholar-Elect of Balliol College in Oxford and Captain of Football at the Dulwich College in 1914. He was a Lieutenant of the Tank Corps in the British army during the First World War and very well educated. It was interesting to notice in this word cloud that the word 'war' was the most frequently used word in his letters.
I captured the text from www.gutenberg.org (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29333) as they provide numerous downloaded ebooks, in various digital form. In this case I used the plain text version. Most of the books that they have in their archives are books whose copyrights have expired. I utilized www.voyant-tools.org to create the word cloud because this site offers more than just a creative tool for word clouds. Graphs and word location platforms, as well as the ability to eliminate common core words help the researcher in data mining within the text.
I captured the text from www.gutenberg.org (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29333) as they provide numerous downloaded ebooks, in various digital form. In this case I used the plain text version. Most of the books that they have in their archives are books whose copyrights have expired. I utilized www.voyant-tools.org to create the word cloud because this site offers more than just a creative tool for word clouds. Graphs and word location platforms, as well as the ability to eliminate common core words help the researcher in data mining within the text.
Voyant-tools.org offers some much more for the digital historian. In this screen shot, one can see the various tools available. One particular way in which analysis can be gathered about the letters, is to graft frequencies of words within them. The text within the book was broken up in three sections. I only copied the text of the letters and left other narrative out. So, by using the upload feature on the home page, I could upload the saved word documents of each section that I copied from my files on my laptop. If I wanted to see how often the word 'war' occurred, I could select this in the 'Word Trends' feature on the right.
In this graph above, the relative frequencies of the word 'war' is evenly distributed in the three separate sections of the memoir and occur somewhere above 25 times.
It is interesting to note that the word 'home' doesn't appear as often, and decreases the longer he was at the battlefield. The only other words that appear in the word cloud that would have any possible connection to the home front were Dulwich and school. I believe his father noted in the book that this place was where his son was the happiest. Paul Jones died on the battlefield July 31st, 1917, at the very young age of 21.