Friday, July 19, 2013

Happy Anniversary suffragists





Since I've been working on a digital  history project using the corpus History of Woman Suffrage, this tweet prompted me to play around a little


On July 19, 1848 the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention began



Surprisingly references to the anniversary of Seneca Falls appear sparingly in the six volume History of Woman Suffrage, a mere 25 times.  However the distribution is interesting with a HUGE spike in Volume 3, the last volume edited by Stanton and Anthony.  Volume III covers the postbellum period of 1876–1885. 





On such a small body of texts,  corpus analytics can’t tell us much, but I ran AntConc with clusters of 4 L and R, revealing anniversaries, as would be expected.

Total No. of Cluster Types: 30
Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 37
1          2          Anniversary, July 19, Edward M
2          2          eighth Anniversary, July 19, Edward
3          2          July 19, 1878--The Last Convention
4          2          July 19, Edward M. Davis
5          2          N. Y., July 19, 1878--The
6          2          Twenty-eighth Anniversary, July
7          2          Y., July 19, 1878--The Last
8          1          convention, held July 19, 1848, in
9          1          Falls, N. Y., July
10       1          hall, Philadelphia, July 19, 20, of
11       1          held July 19, 1848, in the
12       1          in ---- hall, Philadelphia, July
13       1          Journal_ of July 19, said
14       1          July 19, 1848, as well as
15       1          July 19, 1878. This will be
16       1          July 19, 20, 1848. In commemoration of
17       1          July 19, the Citizens' Suffrage
18       1          N. Y., July 19, 1848--thus
19       1          N. Y., July 19, 20, 1848. In
20       1          On July 19, the Citizens
21       1          rights convention, held July
22       1          rights movement July 19, 1878, by
23       1          Rochester, N. Y., July
24       1          s rights movement July
25       1          TENAFLY, New Jersey, July
26       1          that village on July
27       1          village on July 19, 1868, to
28       1          Y., July 19, 1848, as well
29       1          Y., July 19, 1878. This will
30       1          Y., July 19, 20, 1848. In commemoration


Reading the History of Woman Suffrage is pretty dry business, and of late I've fallen in love with metadata.  Using Alexander Street Press Women and Social Movements, I looked into  author document type and subject tags in 8 files containing July 19* I visualized as a word cloud (click to play)





Since I live in Philadelphia I was particularly intrigued by "the women's centennial" the celebrations suffragists organized at the 1876 World's Fair, including a "woman's building" (the original of the 1973 version I've studies on and off for the past two decades).




*ASP creates parent and child documents which resulted in 20 occurrences in volume three.  I culled the one set of metadata that was identical

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