This site is a base for my thesis research. My thesis is about pedagogy during the American 19th century Reconstruction Era and how we currently teach Reconstruction to students. I'm also interested in policy formed during Reconstruction. The goals of this project are multi-layered and will build over time. The first goal is to complete a distant reading, then a close reading of Susan Eppes book Through Some Eventful Years (1926). I hope to collect data and use digital humanities (DH) tools, such as data visulization and topic modeling to complete this work. The next goal of this project is look at other Reconstruction Era textbooks that were advocated by The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and textbooks that they thought were "bad" because they did not promote Lost Cause pedagogy/mythology. Over time I hope to compare texts using topic modeling and data visualization. I'm slowly collecting textbooks and conducting a distant reading of the text. Another part of this project is thinking criticially about digital humanities and it's uses. I plan on doing a close reaidng of all the texts used in my analysis because I think it's necessary in comprehending the texts. Close vs. distant reading are a coming binary in digital humanities and I hope to think and write critically about these modes of observering and comprehending texts.
I'm currently working on a distant reading of Eppes text.
Metadata table uses the following categorization:
- Chapter title
- Author
- Publishing date
- Years covered
- Word count
- Location
- Audience