Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 19, 2015

Civil War Navies Bookworm

Filed under: History,Humanities,Indexing,Ngram Viewer,Searching,Text Analytics — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

Civil War Navies Bookworm by Abby Mullen.

From the post:

If you read my last post, you know that this semester I engaged in building a Bookworm using a government document collection. My professor challenged me to try my system for parsing the documents on a different, larger collection of government documents. The collection I chose to work with is the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. My Barbary Bookworm took me all semester to build; this Civil War navies Bookworm took me less than a day. I learned things from making the first one!

This collection is significantly larger than the Barbary Wars collection—26 volumes, as opposed to 6. It encompasses roughly the same time span, but 13 times as many words. Though it is still technically feasible to read through all 26 volumes, this collection is perhaps a better candidate for distant reading than my first corpus.

The document collection is broken into geographical sections, the Atlantic Squadron, the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, and so on. Using the Bookworm allows us to look at the words in these documents sequentially by date instead of having to go back and forth between different volumes to get a sense of what was going on in the whole navy at any given time.

Before you ask:

The earlier post: Text Analysis on the Documents of the Barbary Wars

More details on Bookworm.

As with all ngram viewers, exercise caution in assuming a text string has uniform semantics across historical, ethnic, or cultural fault lines.

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