Text Analysis

God and Freedom

Looking through the list of terms the word god stood out to me. This led me to choose my additional words- lord, free, freedom and master. I know only a little about attempts to Christianize slaves and that there were some slaves who adopted the religion of their masters and those that took some aspects of it but made it their own. This is interesting to me and I was curious about whether the texts we are analyzing made any associations between god or religion and freedom. I included master as it was the second most used word and to see how often these other words were used in proportion to that word.

           In the Mandala we can see that each of these words shows up in most texts with freedom actually showing up in the least overall. This was surprising but also it could be that the writers were using different variations of it, as we can see with the term free. The term lord shows up in most text but, as we’ll see below with the Links application, I question whether they are address the Lord as in a spiritual sense or lord as in a person. Also, interestingly lord, master and god appear in the Hammond piece but not freedom or free, while Arthur only mentions god but nothing else.

The Links tool shows the words most used in connection with the search term. God appears with things like help, said, word and man. Which makes me think they are asking god for help or using the words of god to plead their case for freedom. The term free is closely linked to people and states, while freedom is linked to obtain and obtaining. Then we have master which, like god, is in close proximity to said. Unlike god, mistress shows up frequently near master, as well as slave. Lord is the more unusual and requires a better look at the text. I do not even know what most of these words mean or are supposed to be referencing.

Finally, the Trends tool shows when each term appears in the texts. Free and freedom closely follow the same path, appearing in similar texts. God appears in most but is talked about more often in some texts than others. It was interesting that the text that use the term god the most also used the terms free and freedom the least. This makes me reconsider my previous thought that the two are connected. There is a closer correlation between the terms master and freedom and free which makes sense.

I think there is something worth exploring here. I am curious about the subject and would be interested to look further into how god is being used in these texts and why it does not appear so frequently with ideas of freedom or being free. Of course, I could be thinking of these terms’ association all wrong and their connection is based in questioning how those who claim to be religious could also practice and promote slavery.