Documents and words have shaped America. There can be no doubt of that. From the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, to the Gettysburg Address, to the famous words of modern presidents, there is without a doubt that throughout American History, the pen is mightier than the sword.
The Federalist Papers were a defining document that shaped how Americans viewed the new constitution, and to some degree, how they still view it to this day. Deeper dives into the Federalist papers provide insight and perspective on how much things are mentioned and referenced. Using the Voyant tool was very helpful in obtaining this information.
One of the first graphs I noticed was the “Trends” Graph. In Voyant, this helps the reader and viewer of the documents understand, down to individual words, how often something was mentioned. In doing research, I found one of the more used terms, “states,” and plotted it on a graph.
This Graph indicates the number of times that the word states was used, spread out by frequency of the word across the Federalist Papers. The horizontal numbers indicate The Organization of the Papers themselves (for instance, 1) is Papers 1-10, and so on). This graph stuck out to me because it really emphazises the usage of words and phrases that were primary focuses of the writers.
Another graph that I found most interesting was the “links” graph that was used. I found this one very usable, primarily because it shows links to context of what the writers were intending.
The useage of main words are in blue, indicating that the links to the smaller words in yellow are much stronger and are connected to the more used words. This is helpful in understanding important contexts and clues about what the writers might be trying to get across.
Voyant is an excellent tool that has been used to discuss this subject matter. It provides an overview look of whatever one might be researching, in this case, the Federalist Papers. Using Voyant, it makes research and text mining far more efficient and time-saving. It also provides clues into what to look for. Uses of specific words, and how many times they were used, is something that stood out to me when researching. It helped me gain perspective into the papers themselves.
Voyant also does a fine job of helping begin deeper dives into specific topics. After a more general look, I delved into Federalist No. 81. These final essays, this one in particular, delves into judiciary authority and focuses on laws and the roles of those ruling on them. While words such as “government” and “states” are still thrown aro
und quite a bit, there is much more of a mention with words like “judiciary” and “trials.” This indicates that while much of the general outline remained the same, most of the specific topic matter had changed as well. The vocabulary in these papers indicated that there was more to do in defending the constitution then just throwing around the words “government” and “state.” Narrowed topics needed to be discussed and applied in order to persuade people to back the Constitution.
Voyant does a fine job with providing context and reasoning, and keys for deeper research. In the case of the Federalist Papers, this was no different. It is imperative to use the tools of the present to understand the past.
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