Okay, to be honest I have been having trouble getting the files to work on my computer. Something has not been synching and I still need a little time to get it to work properly. I think if I can tinker around with my computer a little more I will finally get everything to run…
In the text analysis for my years, having a mildly confusing set due to the lack of resources in the Portal of Texas History for the Texas State Gazette 1848, shed little light on the issues at hand. For 1848 I have the Telegraph and Register and the Northern Standard, and for the Texas State…
The word trends presented on voyant-tools.org and Python of runaway slave ads from the Clarksville Standard, the Houston Telegraph, and the Austin Gazette for the years 1849 and 1854 suggests that comparatively more slaves were advertised missing from Houston and were more frequently reported captured in Clarksville and Austin. The word counts may not accurately…
After counting the word frequencies in runaway slave ads with Python, the top ten words of each newspaper and the combined set were very similar. Negro appeared as the most used word in all but the Gazette (county trumps negro). The remaining top ten words almost uniformly fell into descriptors: years and old for age,…
According to the first round of word counts for the runaway slave ads for the year 1856, the word ‘negro’ was used the most often, with a total of 42 entries in all three newspapers. The reason that this word is the most popular is rather straightforward. The owners of the runaway slaves used this term…
Upon analyzing the word frequencies for the Telegraph, the Gazette, and the Standard, there are several interesting conclusions which can be drawn. In an overall comparison of the terms, the newspapers in general tended to use political words like “country”, “law”, “city”, and “government” while the slave ads tended to use descriptive words like “high”,…
A word frequency analysis of the slave ads in three papers during 1859 pointed to some interesting trends. First, within each separate paper and the aggregate sample descriptive height, feet, and inches were some of the most common words. They appeared within the top ten most frequent words of each paper, suggesting that basic estimates…
Looking through the word count for our three newspapers for the year 1857 shows a few interesting things. The most common term, with 51 uses, is “negro” which is not all that surprising considering the subject matter we are dealing with. The high usage (42) of the term “boy” is also not overly surprising, but…
I noticed very clear categories emerge in my word counts. In the combination of all three newspapers’ slave ads, I subdivided the words used 5 or more times into a few categories: date, description of slave, locations, money (reward or paper cost), people involved in the ad (owner or sheriff etc), and the state of…