Tag: Voyant

For this assignment I decided to cover the difference between the encyclopedia of St Louis in 1862 and 1879. The 1879 document is significantly shorter than the 1862, so I would assume the majority of key words will come from the longer 1862 document. I was surprised that the 1879 document which I looked over, seemed to cover mostly the numbers and economy of St Louis rather than any other aspects of the area. I would assume the longer document may dive deeper.

After inserting the longer document into Voyant, it shows that my hypothesis about what the contents may include was correct. While the shorter 1879 document focused a lot on the numbers of agriculture specifically. The longer 1862 document focuses on the entire infrastructure of St Louis, several areas such as schools ,libraries, and hospitals as shown in this visual. This was surprising to me as I figured that these infrastructures would have been more developed and further explored in the newest document, rather than early.

The two documents I chose to compare were Alton’s encyclopedia 1880 and 1906. My hypothesis is that the population would significantly increase from the mid-1850’s to early 1900’s. Hence some manufacturing developments were established in 1903, my hypothesis was correct. The population was approximately 12,000 in 1857. In the 1900’s the population in Alton had risen up to 14,210. The visualization I would use to test my hypothesis would be like a timeline graph.

for thr lab I chose to compare to the alton encyclopedia documents.

off of a brief skim I assume both texts will likely mention the town and the river quite a bit.

after processing the corpus, I found that indeed both mentioned the name Alton and the river quite a bit. Additionally the both mention Saint Louis and the Mississippi River by name.

something interesting is that the 1906 version has on average 1 more word per sentence, maybe some indication of a move toward more elegant language compared to the earlier text.