Text Analysis – master,slaves,family,auction

The four terms I decided to search for are: master, slaves, family, and auction. I chose these because I was curious if there was any significant selling of entire families at slave auctions. For my first visualization, I decided to try the Trends tool.

Throughout the tutorial, it was obvious just how prevalent master was across all the texts. While I knew it would appear the most, I wanted to have a clear comparison to the other terms so a line graph made sense. Here we see that master is actually overshadowed a few times. In 1750-royal, all terms except auction appear more than master. In fact, auction is rarely used in general. Overall, this graph shows a reasonably equal distribution for slaves and family except in the later texts when slaves becomes the most used term of the four. This is an interesting part of the graphic. Why is there a significant decrease in the use of master and an increase in slaves? Are we seeing more slave narratives here that focus on personal narratives?

Stream Graphs was my second choice for two reasons. The first is because I chose it for a previous assignment and wished to tinker with it some more. The second is because it looks so bizarre. Unlike the line graph above, it is difficult to see when and where one term trumps another. The Relative Frequencies axis does aid with this but not as effective as the line graph. This graph does not show the comparable distribution of slaves and family and calls into question my initial analysis.

My final choice is the one I regret the most. I initially chose Mandala graph because of the similar spelling to Nelson Mandela. My first impression was of confusion and anxiety with all the edges with the many terms. The perk of this graph is showing which texts are overlapping with your selected terms. When there are numerous terms, it can become confusing very quickly. By narrowing it down to four, it becomes a bit easier to pick apart. In the previous graphs, auction was barely noticeable. Here, we can actually see that the term is used in a few texts. The problem with the graph is that there is no scale to show frequency and does not offer much in terms of creating a fun experience in text analysis.