The next case study of letters in war is the partial collection of letters written by a Liberty, South Carolina young man who was a Sargent in WWI, Sam Riggins. In this partial set, 69 letters dated from November 1917 to May 1919 were imported to the Voyant-tools.org program to generate a word cloud formation. This time period was when he first was drafted into Camp and then over to France, ending with a letter dated May 22, 1919 from a hospital in VA, when he returned. This is the first word cloud.
It is very interesting to note that the word 'home' or 'war' does not even appear in the grouping. The dates of 1918 is from the dating on the letters, and 'Sam,' 'arrie,' 'riggins,' and 'sgt' appear because of the structure of the letter, as Arrie was who he addressed his letters to, and of course he signed his name, Sgt. Sam Riggins. These words needed to be placed on the Stop Word List. After doing this, this new word cloud was generated.
This second word cloud places emphasis on words that are connections to home, such as 'write' and 'letter.' Other frequent words such as 'hope' were used in the context of his own style of writing when he began his letters, he stated that he was well, and he hoped Arrie was too.
In the Voyant-tool program, I used the core words 'home' and 'war' to find the graph for the raw frequencies for the two words, which I have concentrated on in the previous case studies. They are below.
In the Voyant-tool program, I used the core words 'home' and 'war' to find the graph for the raw frequencies for the two words, which I have concentrated on in the previous case studies. They are below.
Both words appear equally in Sam Riggins' letters. What this does is provide new questions and assertions that more data is needed to study the connections to the home front and to the battle fields. One idea that comes to mind, is the thought that perhaps other words could 'replace' the connection to 'home.' I say this because when reading his letters to Arrie, it was discovered that he was not receiving many letters from his own family and Arrie was apparently the only one who wrote to him on a regular basis. Therefore, while she was not necessarily from his own home, she was the vital connection to 'home.' His post scripts were most often pleas to write soon, answer quickly, write longer letters, and so forth. The words 'write' and 'letter' became a symbolic word substitution for home in this case study as Arrie's letters were the connection he had to South Carolina. The graph of the raw frequency of 'write' is below.