For this assignment I chose to analyze text from John Trowbridge’s 1866 travelogue titled The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People. I obtained the text through Google Books here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_South/IsBOdvp_1A4C?hl=en&gbpv=0
This popular work chronicles Trowbridge’s voyage through the southern states of the ex-Confederacy at the end of the Civil War, producing for a largely northern readership an on-the-ground view of the war-torn landscape of the South, its crumbling infrastructure and social order, and the beginnings of a new social order taking shape. It is a popular account meant for a mass audience, and contains considerable dialogue and unique situations that one cannot help but think are either embellished for literary quality or simply made up. It is an entertaining account that does give the reader a sense of the lived reality of the postwar South, of the texture of daily life, at least through the eyes of a northern white man of the 1860s.
I used this work because Trowbridge spends some time in the Corinth, Mississippi area, and relates some colorful experiences in the town and the countryside between it and the famous Battle of Shiloh across the state line in Tennessee.
First Visualization: Word Cloud
Once I removed the stopwords, some interesting trends in the text became clear. Some are unsurprising: war, white, freedmen, people, negro, rebel, cotton, union, and battle all relate to the just-finished Civil War and are common vocabulary terms of the time, with an emphasis upon race and the newly-freed condition of the formerly enslaved peoples of the region trying to establish an economic foundation in the wake of war. This economic foundation is likely best indicated as an important theme by the inclusion of the word “work” among the most frequent in the text. I found most interesting, though, the frequency of “man” or “men,” as it indicates the gender conventions of the time and Trowbridge’s prioritizing of males over females in his telling. The most popular word – “said” – indicates how much dialogue there is, while “house” likely reveals Trowbridge’s attention to the built environment of the region and his common visits to people’s homes as he is traveling. The common use of “old” could indicate Trowbridge’s attention to the form and functions of an old society dying and a new one being born.
Second Visualization: Trend Graph
Frequency of the words “Corinth” or “Corinthians.” Trowbridge visited Corinth and southwest Tennessee about halfway through his journey throughout the South. He makes lots of comments about war-torn Corinth, the most notable of which is the bad reception he gets from a Corinth woman who, after learning Trowbridge is from Massachusetts, comments “Ohhh you’re a bad Yankee!” Again, whether this is true or not, or embellished, is up for debate. But it’s entertaining.
Third Visualization: Trend Graph
This is a graph of the frequency of the words “Said” (in gray) and “House” (in pink), providing general evidence of the connection in the book between dialogue and visits to houses or towns. It gives insights into the flow of Trowbridge’s narrative.