Comments on: Text Analysis of Martha Ballard’s Diary (Part 3) http://historying.org/2009/10/19/text-analysis-of-martha-ballards-diary-part-3/ thoughts on scholarship and history in a digital age Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:02:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Cameron Blevins http://historying.org/2009/10/19/text-analysis-of-martha-ballards-diary-part-3/#comment-479 Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:27:50 +0000 http://historying.org/?p=897#comment-479 Agnieszka,

Thanks for the kind note. Your research sounds fascinating! I have close to zero background in sociolinguistics, but I can imagine the applications are pretty wide-ranging. I think one of the fundamental challenges to my approach here is one of context – figuring out ambiguities or references without a human reader looking at each instance is tough. I’m hoping to devote some more time to exploring the diary in the next month or so, and will post whatever else I find here.

Thanks again!

-Cameron

]]> By: Agnieszka Kielkiewicz-Janowiak http://historying.org/2009/10/19/text-analysis-of-martha-ballards-diary-part-3/#comment-478 Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:19:06 +0000 http://historying.org/?p=897#comment-478 Cameron,
I am really impressed by your work and dedication to getting an in-depth understanding Martha’s story. I came across this wonderful text resource when I was researching New England women’s private writings over 10 years ago. Working mostly from Poland, I found it invaluable to to be able to access this manuscript online (while I had to retrieve others from microfilm in a UMass library when I was there a short time). My special interest, as a sociolinguist, was language patterns and the occurrence of structures such as do-less negation, periphrastic do in declaratives, conjunctions (e.g. the almost obsolete “ere”), be and have with mutative intransitives, modal verbs, pronouns, etc. I was not just the word count I was after, but most importantly the context (broad and narrow). How I wish I had access to your expertise then! I published a book on the language of a few New England women in 2002. Thank you for renewing my interest in the text of martha’s diary. And congratulations on your results!

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