Historians of the American West have a county problem. It’s primarily one of geographic size: counties in the West are really, really big. A “List of the Largest Counties in the United States” might as well be titled “Counties in the Western United States (and a few others)” – you have to go all the way to #30 before you find one that falls east of the 100th meridian. The problem this poses to historians is that a lot of historical data was captured at a county level, including the U.S. Census.

San Bernardino County

San Bernardino County is famous for this – the nation’s largest county by geographic area, it includes the densely populated urban sprawl of the greater Los Angeles metropolis along with vast swathes of the uninhabited Mojave Desert. Assigning a single count of anything to San Bernardino county to is to teeter on geographic absurdity. But, for nineteenth-century population counts in the national census, that’s all we’ve got.

Here’s a basic map of population figures from the 1870 census. You can see some general patterns: central California is by far the most heavily populated area, with some moderate settlement around Los Angeles, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe. But for anything more detailed, it’s not terribly useful. What if there was a way to get a more fine-grained look at settlement patterns in these gigantic western counties? This is where my work on the postal system comes in. There was a post office in (almost) every nineteenth-century American town. And because the department kept records for all of these offices – the name of the office, its county and state, and the date it was established or discontinued – a post office becomes a useful proxy to study patterns over time and space. I assembled this data for a single year (1871) and then wrote a program to geocode each office, or to identify its location by looking it up in a large database of known place-names. I then supplemented it with the the salaries of postmasters at each office for 1871. From there, I could finally put it all onto a map:

The result is a much more detailed regional geography than that of the U.S. Census. Look at Wyoming in both maps. In 1870, the territory was divided into five giant rectangular counties, all of them containing less than 5,000 people. But its distribution of post offices paints a different picture: rather than vertical units, it consisted largely of a single horizontal stripe along its southern border.

Similarly, our view of Utah changes from a population core of Salt Lake City to a line of settlement running down the center of the territory, with a cluster in the southwestern corner completely obscured in the census map.

Post offices can also reveal transportation patterns: witness the clear skeletal arc of a stage-line that ran from the Oregon/Washington border southeast to Boise, Idaho.

Connections that didn’t mirror the geographic unit of a state or county tended to get lost in the census. One instance of this was the major cross-border corridor running from central Colorado into New Mexico. A map of post offices illustrate its size and shape; the 1870 census map can only gesture vaguely at both.

The following question, of course, should be asked of my (and any) map: what’s missing? Well, for one, a few dozen post offices. This speaks to the challenges of geocoding more than 1,300 historical post offices, many of which might have only been in existence for a single year or two. I used a database of more than 2 million U.S. place-names and wrote a program that tried to account for messy data (spelling variations, altered state or county boundaries, etc.). The program found locations for about 90% of post offices, while the remaining offices I had to locate by hand. Not surprisingly, they were missing from the database for a reason: these post offices were extremely obscure. Finding them entailed searching through county histories, genealogy message boards, and ghost town websites – a process that is simply not scalable beyond a single year. By 1880, the number of post offices in the West had doubled. By 1890, and it doubled again. I could conceivably spend years trying to locate all of these offices. So, what are the implications of incomplete data? Is automated, 90% accuracy “good enough”?

What else is missing? Differentiation. The salary of a postmaster partially addresses this problem, as the department used a formula to determine compensation based partially on the amount of business an office conducted. But it was not perfectly proportional. If it was, the map would be one giant circle covering everything: San Francisco conducted more business than any other office by several orders of magnitude. As it is, the map downplays urban centers while highlighting tiny rural offices. A post office operates in a kind of binary schema: no office, no people (well, at least very few). If there was an office, there were people there. We just don’t know how many. The map isn’t perfect, but it does start to tackle the county problem in the West.

*Note: You can download a CSV file containing post offices, postmaster salaries, and latitude/longitude coordinates here.*

In November 2012 the United States Postal Service reported a staggering deficit of $15.9 billion. For the historian, this begs the question: was it always this bad? Others have penned far more nuanced answers to this question, but my starting point is a lot less sophisticated: a table of yearly expenses and income.

US Postal Department Surplus (Gray) or Deficit (Red) by Year

So, was the postal department always in such terrible fiscal shape? No, not at first. But from the 1840s onward, putting aside the 1990s and early 2000s, deficits were the norm. The next question: What was the geography of deficits? Which states paid more than others? Essentially, who picked up the check?

Every year the Postmaster General issued a report containing a table of receipts and revenues broken down by state. Let’s take a look at 1871:

1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General – Receipts and Expenditures

Because it’s only one table, I manually transcribed the columns into a spreadsheet. At this point, I could turn to ArcGIS to start analyzing the data, maybe merging the table with a shapefile of state boundaries provided by NHGIS. But ArcGIS is a relatively high-powered tool better geared for sophisticated geospatial analysis. What I’m doing doesn’t require all that much horsepower. And, in fact, quantitative spatial relationships (ex. measurements of distance or area) aren’t all that important for answering the questions I’ve posed. There are a number of different software packages for exploring data, but Tableau provides a quick-and-dirty, drag-and-drop interface. In keeping with the nature of data exploration, I’ve purposefully left the following visualizations rough around the edges. Below is a bar graph, for instance, showing the surplus or deficit of each state, grouped into rough geographic regions:

Postal Surplus or Deficit by State – 1871

Or, in map form:

Postal Surplus (Black) or Deficit (Red) by State – 1871

Between the map and the bar graph, it’s immediately apparent that:
a) Most states ran a deficit in 1871
b) The Northeast was the only region that emerged with a surplus

So who picked up the check? States with large urban, literate populations: New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois. Who skipped out on the bill? The South and the West. But these are absolute figures. Maybe Texas and California simply spent more money than Arizona and Idaho because they had more people. So let’s normalize our data by analyzing it on a per-capita basis, using census data from 1870.

Postal Surplus or Deficit per Person by State – 1871

The South and the West may have both skipped out on the bill, but it was the West that ordered prime rib and lobster before it left the table. Relative to the number of its inhabitants, western states bled the system dry. A new question emerges: how? What was causing this extreme imbalance of receipts and expenditures in the West? Were westerners simply not paying into the system?

Postal Receipts and Expenditures per Person by Region – 1871

Actually, no. The story was a bit more complicated. On a per-capita basis, westerners were paying slightly more money into the system than any other region. The problem was that providing service to each of those westerners cost substantially more than in any other region: $38 per person, or roughly 4-5 times the cost of service in the east. For all of its lore of rugged individualism and a mistrust of big government, the West received the most bloated government “hand-out” of any region in the country. This point has been driven home by a generation of “New Western” historians who demonstrated the region’s dependence on the federal government, ranging from massive railroad subsidies to the U.S. Army’s forcible removal of Indians and the opening of their lands to western settlers. Add the postal service to that long list of federal largesse in the West.

But what made mail service in the West so expensive? The original 1871 table further breaks down expenses by category (postmaster salaries, equipment, buildings, etc.). Some more mucking around in the data reveals a particular kind of expense that dominated the western mail system: transportation.

Transportation Expenses per Person by State (State surplus in black, deficit in red) – 1871

High transport costs were partially a function of population density. Many western states like Idaho or Montana consisted of small, isolated communities connected by long mail routes. But there’s more to the story. Beginning in the 1870s, a series of scandals wracked the postal department over its “star” routes (designated as any non-steamboat, non-railroad mail route). A handful of “star” route carriers routinely inflated their contracts and defrauded the government of millions of dollars. These scandals culminated in the criminal trial of high-level postal officials, contractors, and a former United States Senator. In 1881, the New York Times printed a list of the ninety-three routes under investigation for fraud. Every single one of these routes lay west of the Mississippi.

Annual Cost of “Star” Routes Under Investigation for Fraud – 1881 (Locations of Route Start/End Termini)

The rest of the country wasn’t just subsidizing the West. It was subsidizing a regional communications system steeped in fraud and corruption. The original question – “Who picked up the check?” – leads to a final cliffhanger: why did all of these frauds occur in the West?

The Elevator Speech

I’m studying communications networks in the late nineteenth-century American West by mapping the geography of the U.S. postal system.*

The Elevator-Stuck-Between-Floors Speech

From the end of the Civil War until the end of the nineteenth century the US. Post steadily expanded into a vast communications network that spanned the continent. By the turn of the century the department was one of the largest organizational units in the world. More than 200,000 postmasters, clerks, and carriers were involved in shuttling billions of pounds of material between 75,000 offices at the cost of more than $100 million dollars a year. As a spatial network the post followed a particular geography. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the West, where the region’s miners, ranchers, settlers, and farmers led their lives on the network’s periphery. My dissertation aims to uncover the geography of the post on its western periphery: where it spread, how it operated, and its role in shaping the space and place of the region.

My project rests on the interplay between center and periphery. The postal network hinged on the relationship between its bureaucratic center in Washington, DC and the thousands of communities that constituted the nodes of that network. In the case of the West, this relationship was a contentious one. Departmental bureaucrats found themselves buffeted with demands to reign in ballooning deficits. Yet they were also required by law to provide service to every corner of the country, no matter how expensive. And few regions were costlier than the West, where a sparsely settled population scattered across a huge area was constantly rearranged by the boom-and-bust cycles of the late nineteenth century. From the top-down perspective of the network’s center, providing service in the West was a major headache. From the bottom-up perspective of westerners the post was one of the bedrocks of society. For most, it was the only affordable and accessible form of long-distance communication. In a region marked by transience and instability, local post offices were the main conduits for contact with the wider world. Western communities loudly petitioned their Congressmen and the department for more offices, better post roads, and speedier service. In doing so, they redefined the shape and contours of both the network and the wider geography of the region.

The post offers an important entry point into some of the major forces shaping American society in the late nineteenth century. First, it helped define the role of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, for many Americans the post was the federal government. Articulating the geographic size and scale of the postal system will offer a corrective to persistent caricatures of the nineteenth-century federal government as weak and decentralized. More specifically, a generation of “New Western” historians have articulated the omnipresent role of the state in the West. Analyzing the relationship between center and periphery through the post’s geography provides a means of mapping the reach of federal power in the region. With the postal system as a proxy for state presence, I can begin to answer questions such as: where and how quickly did the state penetrate the West? How closely did it follow on the heels of settler migration, railroad development, or mining industries? Finally, the post was deeply enmeshed in a system of political patronage, with postmasterships disbursed as spoils of office. What was the relationship between a communications network and the geography of regional and national politics?

Second, the post rested on an often contentious marriage between the public and private spheres. Western agrarian groups upheld the post as a model public monopoly. Nevertheless, private hands guided the system’s day-to-day operations on its periphery. Payments to mail-carrying railroad companies became the department’s single largest expenditure, and it doled out millions of dollars each year to private contractors to carry the mail in rural areas. This private/public marriage came with costs – in the early 1880s, for instance, the department was rocked by corruption scandals when it discovered that rural private contractors had paid kickbacks to department officials in exchange for lavish carrying contracts. How did this uneasy alliance of public and private alter the geography of the network? And how did the department’s need to extend service in the rural West reframe wider debates over monopoly, competition, and the nation’s political economy?

Getting Off The History Elevator

That’s the idea, at least. Rather than delve into even greater detail on historiography or sources, I’ll skip to a topic probably more relevant for readers who aren’t U.S. historians: methodology. Digital tools will be the primary way in which I explore the themes outlined above. Most obviously, I’m going to map the postal network. This entails creating a spatial database of post offices, routes, and timetables. Unsurprisingly, that process will be incredibly labor intensive: scanning and georeferencing postal route maps, or transcribing handwritten microfilmed records into a database of thousands of geocoded offices. But once I’ve constructed the database, there are any number of ways to interrogate it.

To demonstrate, I’ll start with lower-hanging fruit. The Postmaster General issues an annual report providing (among other information) data on how many offices were established and discontinued in each state. These numbers are fairly straightforward to put into a table and throw onto a map. Doing so provides a top-down view of the system from the perspective of a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. For instance, by looking at the number of post offices discontinued each year it’s possible to see the wrenching reverberations of the Civil War as the postal system struggled to reintegrate southern states into its network in 1867:

Post Offices Discontinued By State, 1867
(Source: Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1867)

The West, meanwhile, was arguably the system’s most unstable region. As measured by the percentage of its total offices that were either established or discontinued each year, states such as New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana were continually building and dismantling new nodes in the network.

Post Offices Established or Discontinued as a Percentage of Total Post Offices in State, 1882
(Source: Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1882)

Of course, the broad brush strokes of national, year-by-year data only provide a generalized snapshot of the system. I plan on drilling down to far more detail  by charting where and when specific post offices were established and discontinued. This will provide a much more fine-grained (both spatially and temporally) view of how the system evolved. Geographer Derek Watkins has employed exactly this approach:

Screenshot from Derek Watkins, “Posted: U.S. Growth Visualized Through Post Offices” (25 September 2011)

Derek’s map demonstrates the power of data visualization: it is compelling, interactive, and conveys an enormous amount of information far more effectively than text alone. Unfortunately, it also relies on an incomplete dataset. Derek scraped the USPS Postmaster Finder, which the USPS built as a tool for genealogists to look up postmaster ancestors. The USPS historian adds to it on an ad-hoc basis depending on specific requests by genealogists. In a conversation with me, she estimated that it encompasses only 10-15% of post offices, and there is no record of what has been completed and what remains to be done. Derek has, however, created a robust data visualization infrastructure. In a wonderful demonstration of generosity, he has sent me the code behind the visualization. Rather than spending hours duplicating Derek’s design work, I’ll be able to plug my own, more complete, post office data into a beautiful existing interface.

Derek’s generosity brings me back to my ongoing personal commitment to scholarly sharing. I plan on making the dissertation process as open as possible from start to finish. Specifically, the data and information I collect has broad potential for applications beyond my own project. As the backbone of the nation’s communications infrastructure, the postal system provides rich geographic context for any number of other historical inquiries. Cameron Ormsby, a researcher in Stanford’s Spatial History Lab, has already used post office data I collected as a proxy for measuring community development in order to analyze the impact of land speculation and railroad construction in Fresno and Tulare counties.

To kick things off, I’ve posted the state-level data I referenced above on my website as a series of CSV files. I also used Tableau Public to generate a quick-and-dirty way for people to interact with and explore the data in map form. This is an initial step in sharing data and I hope to refine the process as I go. Similarly, I plan on occasionally blogging about the project as it develops. Rather than narrowly focusing on the history of the U.S. Post, my goal (at least for now) is to use my topic as a launchpad to write about broader themes: research and writing advice, discussions of digital methodology, or data and visualization releases.

*By far the most common response I’ve received so far: “Like the Pony Express?” Interestingly, the Pony Express was a temporary experiment that only existed for about eighteen months in 1860-1861. In terms of mail carried, cost, and time in existence, it was a tiny blip within the postal department’s operations. Yet it has come to occupy a lofty position in America’s historical memory and encapsulates a remarkable number of the contradictions and mythologies of the West.

Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

…

Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.

I always get annoyed when historians mount their high horses to harumph about how Americans don’t know anything about history. But indulge me for one paragraph while I do just that. There are two major problems with Marche’s use of history here. First, it’s inaccurate. There’s a big difference between “loneliness,” “independence” “self-determination” and “self-reliance,” but Marche seems to conflate them all together. The Pilgrims were more about religious reform than religious independence, and leaving one place for another place doesn’t make you lonely. Or alone. Or independent. Or self-reliant. As Marche himself admits, they also pursued their “spiritual rebellion” in an intensely communal manner.

Then there’s the cowboys. Oh boy. A generation of “New Western Historians” have pretty conclusively dispelled the idea of the self-reliant, independent wrangler. Cowboys were always deeply reliant on others: the federal government to remove plains Indians and enforce ranching and riparian rights, or a host of merchants, storekeepers, and meat-packers that inextricably tied them to national and international markets. And I don’t even understand what “traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect” even means.

Image courtesy of Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection

My problem is less with the accuracy of Marche’s history but in how he uses it. I don’t expect an article in the Atlantic to delve into the historiographical intricacies of the Puritans or the problematic nature of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. What Marche is talking about is American mythology, not some “core” of the American character or “actual” history. If he had made this distinction clearer, it’s a quite relevant and important point. Independence, self-reliance, self-determination: these are cherished ideals that undergird many of the stories Americans tell themselves about their past. And it’s fascinating to think about how these ideals interact with the separate (but related) reality of both loneliness and community in a present-day context.

Alexis de Tocqueville tackled this paradox between individualism and communalism two centuries ago in Democracy in America. The French political thinker toured America in 1831 and wrote an expansive account of American institutions, history, society, and character. A major theme running through Democracy in America was the tension between the individualism produced by a society based on equality with institutions and associations based on communal life. De Tocqueville argued that social equality had the downside of producing immensely self-centered people. In true de Tocqueville fashion, he penned one passage that has a ring of timelessness to it – Marche could have used it word-for-word in his characterization of present-day loneliness:

The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

But de Tocqueville goes on to describe how American society during the Jacksonian era combated the effects of isolation brought about by social equality, perhaps most importantly through associational life: “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America. “ Americans in the 1820s and 1830s loved forming groups: political parties, religious sects, reform movements. This was the age of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, massive evangelical revivals, temperance movements, and the American Anti-Slavery Society. So what does it say that one of the most famous historical observers of American society highlighted the intense communalism of that society? My point is not that de Tocqueville was right or wrong, it’s that Americans and critics of American society have always wrestled with the balance between communalism and individualism.

A lack of historicity is my major problem with “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”. Marche uses history as a vague, unexamined point of departure for the present, oftentimes veering into  trope of a lost “Golden Age.” He cites some studies demonstrating, for instance, that the number of households with one inhabitant has increased from 1950, or that the number of personal confidants decreased from the 1980s to the present. Although Eric Klinenberg thoughtfully disputes Marche’s claim that “various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history,” I’m less concerned with the accuracy of Marche’s claims than his treatment of history itself.

There’s a tendency when writing critiques of present-day society to make a direct implication that things are fundamentally new and are changing for the worse. And this tendency seems to be even more prevalent in diatribes against technology, which operate under an often-unexamined assumption that technology X (the telegraph, the automobile, the Internet, social media) has irrevocably reshaped our world. It’s useful to talk about the effects of technological changes: there are many ways in which Facebook and social media has, in fact, fundamentally changed our society. But too often these articles assume that any and every change is a) something fundamentally new, and b) directly attributable to the technology itself. Marche neatly encapsulates this lack of historicity in two sentences: “Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters.”

Facebook isn’t magic and the “good old days of disconnection” only exist in our historical imagination. Not only do cowboys have an American Professional Rodeo Association, the group has its own Facebook page. As de Tocqueville reminds us, we’ve wrestled with the contradictions between loneliness, individualism, and communalism for a long, long time. What Facebook has done is change some of the channels and format of these tensions. Like any technology, it needs to be more thoughtfully placed in its historical context. History is not a golden age or a black box or a passive point of departure for a completely new paradigm. Critics of Facebook or Twitter or whatever new technology will be undermining the “American core” in twenty years should do a better job of keeping this in mind.

The Grind

“Preparing for quals is a full-time job, but there is no reason to put in overtime.” This was one of the best pieces of advice I received when I was asking fellow graduate students about the process. More so than perhaps any other facet of graduate school, studying for quals should be managed like a job. This is for two reasons: to keep pace and to keep sane.

Keep Pace

Quals can be thought of as a simple math problem with two main variables. One variable is the total number of books you need to read. The other is how much time you have to read them. If you have an exam date already set, work backwards to figure out how many books you need to read each week. If you have more control over scheduling the date of the exam, work forwards. Using a baseline of around 3-4 hours for each book, determine how many total hours you will need to read them. In either case, it’s crucial to factor in additional time for things like basic chronology, reviewing material, and meetings with professors (roughly 30-40 hours per field, in my case). Schedule in other commitments, weekends, vacations, or time off depending on your schedule. Finally, add in an additional 2-3 week buffer before the exam. This gives you crucial time to synthesize all of the material and, worst case scenario, a surplus buffer of time to dip into if you get behind on your reading schedule. Add it all up and you’ll get a rough sense for what your pace needs to be. In my case, I ended up having to read roughly 8-9 books a week, with around eight hours of additional preparation each week.

Once you’ve figured out what your pace is, you need to keep track of your progress. I ended up creating a spreadsheet with all of my books and estimates for how much time I’d need on each book (usually 3-4 hours for a normal monograph, several more hours for a synthetic tome like Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought). This gave me a running tally of my progress and how much still remained – unsurprisingly, this was a daunting list in the beginning. But checking off books became a daily ritual that lent an all-important sense of moving forward. Having a schedule also gives you added structure for an experience that can otherwise be dangerously unaccountable. There are days when you will be tired, distracted, or just sick and tired of turning pages. These are the days when lack of daily accountability becomes a problem. Putting off a book one morning might seem trivial at the time, but it adds up quickly. Having a schedule forces you to keep working. It might not be pretty, you might not retain as much from that particular book, but knowing that you have to get through it to reach your “quota” for the week allows you to keep grinding.

Keep Sane 

Treating quals-studying like a job that you clock into and out of also helps to keep your sanity. Just reading and reading for hours every day is an isolating and tiring experience in a way that taking classes, teaching, or even research is not. It’s easy to get lost in the world of endless books, and while this can be rewarding in its own peculiar way it’s also not sustainable. Set a daily reading schedule and try to stick with it. By working consistently at the same times each day it will be much easier for you to “leave” your job. When you’re done for the day, actually be done for the day. I found studying for quals to be draining in a very different way from other aspects of graduate school. Whereas I have no problem answering emails from students at night or thinking about research while I cook dinner, it was much more exhausting to think about the two books I had read that day for quals. If possible, try to take at least one day off a week where you don’t touch a book. And all of the other rules about work/life balance apply: have a social life, exercise, think and talk about things other than history. Clock in, clock out.

Learn How to Not Read

Arguably the most important skill in studying for quals is learning how to not read. When you have to read two books a day, you don’t actually read them. You gut them. Graduate school has likely forced you to begin to do this already, but it will soon become a standard rather than an exception. For inspiration, read Larry Cebula’s “How to Read a Book in One Hour.” Although you will be spending more time on each book, the same general principles apply. Below was my own system for reading a book for quals.

1. Use a template. After much debate I ended up using Evernote as my note-taking medium. I created a basic template that I would use to create a new note for each book. This not only saves time but allows you to remember information more systematically. Finally, taking notes digitally also allows for a more robust catalog and search functionality, especially via tagging systems. By tagging summaries of books with their different subjects, I could quickly pull up, say, all the books on my 19th-century reading list having to do with slavery.

*Download my empty template in Evernote format or as an HTML file, or see an example of a completed note.*

Screenshot of note-taking in Evernote, with Tags and Searches highlighted

2. Use book reviews. Read 2-3 reviews of the book and take notes on them. If possible, try to find a mix of shorter (1-2 page) synopses and lengthier (5-10 page) reviews. You will quickly learn which journals are best for your particular field – in US History, for instance, Reviews in American History offers much more detailed reviews that oftentimes place the books within a broader historiographic context. I would usually pair one of these longer reviews with two shorter ones. By reading several different reviews you can usually glean what the “consensus” is on the book’s major themes and contributions and be on the look-out for these while reading.

3. Be an active reader. I’m aware people have different styles. But for quals, I found the best way to take notes was to sit at a desk with my computer and take notes on every chapter as I went. Whereas in classes I had often read books lying on a couch and used marginalia and underlining, I’ve since soured on this approach. Actively taking notes while you read is less enjoyable, but forces you to synthesize as you go. It’s easy to underline an important sentence without actually understanding it. Paraphrasing forces you to actually get what you read. As for content, start with a careful, word-by-word reading of the introduction and take detailed notes. Then move much more quickly through the book’s chapters, skimming and trying to pull out what’s most important.

Quals tend to privilege arguments over thematic content: few people are going to ask for the specific evidence an author used to support their argument in a particular chapter. However, jotting a sentence down that describes the general setting, actors, and subject of the chapter, separate from its argumentative thrust, allows you to recall it better in the future. It’s important to take notes on both arguments and content. Finally, move fast. Flip past pages that are simply listing additional evidence for an argument. Although these are often the most enjoyable parts of history books they are, unfortunately, tangential to why you’re reading the book. Unless the book was particularly long or particularly important, I tried to cap the reading part of the note-taking process at around three hours.

4. Synthesize. This is crucial. After reading every book I forced myself to take 20-30 minutes and write a careful two-three paragraph summary of the book. This is much harder than simply taking notes because it forces you to distill a book into its barest bones. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s difficult to write a summary of a book you don’t understand or remember, so doing this also makes sure you actually processed what the author was trying to do (or force you to at least take a stab at it). As a supplement to this, as I was reading the book I would write major themes or concepts in a bullet list. Once I got to the end, I would go back and decide which of these were actually major themes or concepts and which ended up being auxiliary. The important themes gave me a basic skeleton from which I could then write a more elaborate summary. These write-ups proved invaluable. When you’re reading two books a day, even a book you read two weeks ago can dissolve into a distant memory. These summaries give you a fast and efficient means of recalling what the book was about. Finally, go back and revise them as you read other books. Oftentimes you don’t understand the broader significance of an author’s argument until you’re able to place it in a larger historiographic context.

* See an example of a full note here. Also see my full listing of book summaries for my US history fields.*

5. Talk it out. This is probably the hardest step, especially in the beginning of the process. But it’s central to studying for quals. There is something about having to verbally articulate an answer that forces you to understand it in a way that simply writing answers or notes does not. Additionally, one of the most challenging parts of quals is to move beyond simply being able to regurgitate a specific author’s argument and move towards higher-level synthesis. It’s one thing to be able to answer: “What is Bernard Bailyn’s interpretation of the American Revolution?” or even “What are three different interpretations of the American Revolution?” It’s much harder to answer, “Was the American Revolution actually revolutionary?” Answering these higher-level questions out loud is hard, but it is a skill at which you can and will get better. Once again, rely on your fellow graduate students, particularly ones who have already taken their exams. Have them ask you practice questions, pretend you are in an actual exam, and give formal answers (rather than the easier route of making it conversational, as in “Well, I’d probably say something about…”). Practice your own answers, but also ask other students for clarifications about topics or books you don’t understand. Do this as early as possible and keep doing it throughout the process. I found it the most useful way to prepare for the exam itself.

6. Go back to the basics. My grasp of the more factual side of American history was surprisingly weak going into the process. It’s easy to spend all of your time learning about historiography and interpretations, but you need a factual framework to build off. Particularly important episodes demand a solid grounding in chronology – for example, the lead-up to the American Revolution or the Civil War. Memorize things like changing geography, presidential administrations, dynastic reigns, economic depressions, major legal cases, etc. Some books, like those in the Oxford Series in American History, offer more nuts-and-bolts information than others. In this case, be aware of that and take more time to read them in more detail, writing separate notes related to basic chronology or events in addition to your notes on the more interpretive side of the book.

Laying the Groundwork (Or, Helping Your Future Self)

From a big-picture standpoint, studying for qualifying exams begins as soon as you start your graduate program. I mean this largely in a meta-sense: you should not be constantly thinking about your quals as a first-semester graduate student, but the classes you are taking, the papers you are writing, the courses you are TAing, are all building your knowledge base. On a more logistical standpoint, you should figure out the details of exams early on: what are the requirements, what the process is generally like, what the deadlines and dates are, who serves on your committee, etc. Which brings me to my first recurring theme:

Theme #1: Ask for Help

Talk to students who have already gone through or are currently going through the process. Department guidelines and handbooks are helpful, but actual students can usually tell you exactly what will happen and what you’ll need to do. Is there a department policy that is particularly onerous? Are credit requirements set in stone, or are they more flexible? Talking to students will give you a better sense for what all you need to do in a way that is often more directly relevant than talking to professors or administrators.

In the classroom, it’s crucial that you take systematic notes. This might seem straightforward. It’s not. There will be many, many weeks where you are swamped by papers, reading, or grading. These are the weeks when it’s much easier to underline and scribble just enough notes in the margin of a book to get through the day’s discussion rather than systematically writing it down. Don’t. Two years later these marginalia that made sense at the time are often barely helpful. Similarly, I’ve found that graduate seminars encourage a different kind of analysis than qualifying exams. In courses you usually talk about a book within a few days of reading it, dissect the book in a discussion setting (often with a graduate student enthusiasm for viciously ripping it apart), and then immediately setting it aside to move on to the following week’s reading. Studying for exams is much more about synthesizing and retaining massive amounts of information and big ideas. Which brings me to my second recurring theme:

Theme #2: Get Organized

Qualifying exams are often as much about persistence and organization as they are about intellectual firepower. Each person has different styles of note-taking, but for studying purposes active synthesis is absolutely crucial. To this end, I would taking 15 minutes after you’ve read and discussed a book to write up a short, 2-3 paragraph summary. I cannot over-emphasize how helpful these summaries will be – unless you are blessed with an extraordinary memory, the particulars of a book will often fade in a matter of weeks or months. Keeping the summary short forces you to consider what the major contributions and points of the book are. Take notes in class discussions about relevant context or historiography, and keep these notes alongside your summary. Your future self will thank you immeasurably.

The process of composing your reading lists will vary from program to program and professor to professor. My experience consisted of me coming up with a draft reading list for each field, submitting it to my committee member for review, and then incorporating their revisions. Regardless of the specifics, always refer to Theme #1: Ask for Help. Nobody sits down and comes up with a list from scratch. Go through as many reading lists from older graduate students as you can and you will start to get a sense for which books are part of the “canon” (for instance, Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black was on every single list I consulted). For some reference, here were my reading lists for Colonial, Nineteenth-Century, and Twentieth-Century U.S. History.

An important note on this stage of the process: this is the fun part. If you’re in a history graduate program for the right reasons, you will be giddy thinking about all these cool books you want to read. This is wonderful, but don’t get carried away. It is easy to put every book you’ve ever wanted to read on the list. Don’t. Adding an extra book here and there seems harmless, but they add up quickly. And when you realize your exam is a month away and you’re fourteen books behind schedule you’ll be kicking yourself for adding in so many extra readings. This ties into my third theme:

Theme #3: Be Efficient 

To winnow it down, ask older graduate students about which are most valuable. Which books are particularly versatile or useful? Are there books they absolutely loved or hated? A book like Robert Self’s American Babylon allows you to answer a wide range of topics related to post-World War II America: metropolitan development, suburbanization, the rise of conservatism, race and identity politics, spatial history, and civil rights. Do you have multiple books covering the same topic? If so, which one(s) should you jettison? For instance, I included both Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone and Philip Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint. Both are fantastic books, but in retrospect there was too much overlap between them. For the purpose of quals I wished I had substituted another book on colonial slavery for the seven-hundred page Slave Counterpoint that offered a much more different approach. Whenever you engage in a give-and-take with your committee member for a particular list, be firm. If you really want to include a particular book or think that the list is getting too long, lobby as strongly as you can to change it. Some professors will give you more leeway than others, but regardless do as much as you can to shape the list into what you want it to be. Which is all a part of my fourth theme:

Theme #4: Own It

Graduate students are endlessly warned about choosing a dissertation topic that they truly love. The same advice should be applied to reading for quals. Take the time to really think about what you want to get out of the entire experience. Figure out what the purpose is supposed to be. Stanford’s process is geared much more broadly towards preparing its graduate students to teach American history. Other programs aim to give you a mastery of the literature related more narrowly to your research agenda. Whatever the purpose, think long and hard about what specifically you want to emerge with. This can be as broad as “designing a survey course on colonial America” or as narrow as “finally understanding the Progressive Era.” Quals are an often-onerous academic hoop for you to jump through, so you might as well try to make it as valuable and enjoyable a hoop as you can.

Over the past three months I was a teaching assistant for History 150A: Colonial and Revolutionary America, taught by Professor Caroline Winterer. The TAs were given the option of lecturing on a topic of our choosing for half of a class period. So on a Tuesday morning in November I found myself death-gripping the sides of a podium and trying to ignore the fact that I had about a hundred eyes staring at me. The next half hour was largely a blur, but fortunately Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning provides a wonderful service for professors, lecturers, and teaching assistants: they will come to your classroom and videotape a class period. So, in what seems appropriate for someone who studies the practice of history in a digital age, the very first lecture of my academic career was captured on video.

Lecturing, and public speaking more generally, is a curiously under-trained aspect of graduate school. I’ve received detailed and continuous feedback over the past year-and-a-half on my historical writing. Yet as graduate students we rarely receive feedback on another fundamental component of being an historian: verbal communication. Especially for the majority of us who will be teaching for the rest of our careers, effectively conveying concepts to a roomful of people is absolutely crucial. This is why I appreciate CTL’s videotaping service so much, and why I have been encouraging everyone I know to take advantage of it. Especially for those of us (like myself) without much experience delivering lectures, they provide a high-quality means of self-assessment.

Do I talk too fast? Too softly? Are my gestures distracting? Do I really say “you know” at the end of every sentence? These are the kinds of questions that often float beneath the radar of our own self-perceptions, but whose answers become immediately apparent when watching a video of yourself lecturing. Beyond noticing verbal patterns, re-watching a lecture allows you to gauge how well the written structure translated into a spoken one. This was one of the more illuminating parts of my own self-evaluation. Some of the examples that I had tried to emphasize in my lecture notes fell flat when I said them out loud. Other points that I had considered secondary came off sounding much more emphatic. An analytical thread that you can easily follow while reading a paragraph sometimes gets lost after two sentences in a lecture. Studying the delivery of a lecture with a knowledge of how it was written drives home the point that building a paper and building a lecture require two related, but fundamentally different, styles of writing.

While videotaped self-assessment can be quite valuable, I quickly realized its limitations in answering the most important questions in evaluating a lecture. How much of it did the students really “get”? Did they actually understand the themes I was trying to describe and the argument I was trying to make? How many remember any of its details a month later? These, of course, are the kinds of pedagogical questions that are notoriously difficult to answer and certainly outside the realm of a thirty-minute video. Regardless, I found delivering a lecture to a roomful of students to be incredibly valuable, and while it wasn’t quite as exciting as stealing the Declaration of Independence, it was a thrilling experience.

The eight students ranged from freshman to the recently-graduated, who majored in everything from history to environmental studies to computer science. Some entered the program with technical experience of ArcGIS software; others had none. Each of them worked under an existing project and were expected to both perform traditional RA duties for the project’s director and also develop their own research agenda for the summer. Under this second track, they worked towards the end goal of producing an online publication for the website based on their own original research. Led by a carefully-planned curriculum, they each selected a topic within the first few weeks, conducted research during the bulk of the summer, went through a draft phase followed by a peer-review process, and rolled out a final publication and accompanying visualizations by the end of the ten weeks. Although not all of them reached the final point of publication at the end of that time, by the final tenth week each of them had produced a coherent historical argument or theme (which is often more than I can say about my own work).

The results were quite impressive, especially given the short time frame. For instance, rising fourth-year Michael DeGroot documented and analyzed the shifting national borders in Europe during World War II. Part of his analysis included a dynamic visualization that allows the reader to see major territorial changes between 1938-1945. DeGroot concludes that one major consequence of all of these shifts was the creation of a broadly ethnically homogenous states. In “Wildlife, Neoliberalism, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Julio Mojica, a rising junior majoring in Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society, analyzed survey data from the late twentieth-century on the island of Chiloé in order to examine links between low civic participation and environmental degradation. Mojica concludes that reliance on the booming salmon industry resulted in greater tolerance for pollution, a pattern that manifested itself more strongly in urban areas. As a final example, senior history major Cameron Ormsby studied late-19th century land speculation in Fresno County and impressively waded into a historiographical debate over the issue. Instead of speculators serving as necessary “middle-men” between small farmers and the state, Ormsby convincingly argues that they in fact handicapped the development of rural communities.

The success of the summer program speaks not only to the enthusiasm and quality of Stanford undergraduates, but more centrally to the direction of the lab and it’s overall working environment. By fostering an attitude of exploration, creativity, and collaboration, the students were not only encouraged, but expected to participate in projects as intellectual peers. The dynamic in the lab was not a traditional one of a faculty member dictating the agenda for the RA’s. In many cases, the students had far greater technical skills and knew more about their specific subjects than the project instructor. The program was structured to give the student’s flexibility and freedom to develop their own ideas, which placed the onus on them to take a personal stake in the wider projects. In doing so, they were exposed to the joys, challenges, and nitty-gritty details of digital humanities research: false starts and dead-ends were just as important as the pivotal, rewarding “aha!” moments that come with any project. Thinking back on internships or research assistant positions, it’s difficult for me to imagine another undergraduate setting that would encourage this kind of wonderfully productive hand-dirtying process. And while I think digital humanities labs hold great potential for advancing humanities scholarship, I have grown more and more convinced that some of their greatest potential lies in the realm of pedagogy.

Each course follows a similar format: one book assigned each week, usually accompanied by additional excerpts or chapters of other books and related essays. The class posted short responses/questions which we then discussed in our once-weekly class. Even with a small class (around 8-12 students), the aggregate of our short responses produced a sizable body of text over the course of the year. The responses also offer a means of gleaning some of the overarching themes of US historiography. As Julie Meloni describes in a post at ProfHacker titled “Wordles, or the gateway drug to textual analysis” word clouds are an easy and playful way to visualize these themes:

Many of the words are not particularly surprising (American, history, and book, for example), but the word cloud does point towards the essence of Stanford’s “core” in training its graduate students to analyze texts from a largely historiographical standpoint. There are relatively few content words  - Vietnam doesn’t appear too often, for instance. Instead, words such as analysis, argument, and narrative crop up in our responses. We are being trained to read a book not for its factual information but in order to evaluate its interpretive arguments. This is a crucial difference that often gets overlooked by those outside the profession, and this characteristic displays itself quite clearly in our responses.

Examining the central books that were assigned in the core gives a glimpse into what our professors thought were the important works in United States historiography. What follows are the major weekly books, in order of publication date:

Patricia Limerick	The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
Gordon Wood	Radicalism of the American Revolution
Charles Sellers	The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846
William Cronon	Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Richard Bushman	The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
Robin Kelley	Race Rebels : Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
Christine Leigh Heyrman	Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt
Amy Dru Stanley	From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation
Kristin Hoganson	Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
Walter Johnson	Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
Ann Fabian	The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America
Mary Dudziak	Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
Elizabeth Anne Fenn	Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
Sven Beckert	The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896
Caroline Winterer	The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910
Paul E. Johnson	Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper
Steven Hahn	A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Jeremi Suri	Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente
Mae Ngai	Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
Louis S. Warren	Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
Susan Scott Parish	American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
Charles Postel	The Populist Vision
Annette Gordon-Reed	The Hemingses of Monticello
Pekka Hamalainen	Comanche Empire
Jackson Lears	Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
Peggy Pascoe	What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
Susan Carruthers	Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing

Taking a look at all twenty-seven books reveals some interesting characteristics. Unsurprisingly, the assigned readings are heavily weighted towards recent work:

Part of the purpose of Stanford’s core is to develop a strong working knowledge of the issues and debates of the field. For example, Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision, published in 2007, takes on interpretations advanced over the past half-century that characterize the 1890s People’s Party as quixotic and backwards-looking. Instead, Postel argues that the movement was deeply committed to ideals of modernity and progress. The Populist Vision serves as an exemplary book to assign in the graduate “core” in part because it provides a strong background for the ongoing issues, debates, and trends of how historians have interpreted late nineteenth-century American politics.

Looking at the authors themselves is also interesting. The gender breakdown is quite even, with fourteen male authors and thirteen female authors. What I decided to examine was not just who these people were, but where they received their historical training. The twenty-seven different authors received their PhD’s from only ten different schools:

Columbia University
Harvard University
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Helsinki
University of Leeds
University of Michigan
Yale University

In short, it’s a narrowly “elite” bunch. Eleven (over 40%) of the authors received their PhDs from Yale alone. Of the eight American schools represented, all of them currently reside in the top ten of US News and World Report’s list of history graduate programs. Of note, the authors had a more diverse background in both their undergraduate education (ranging from Montana State University to SUNY-Empire State) and the schools at which they currently taught. The prestige factor seemed to be most dominant at the graduate level.

The over-representation of elite schools highlights the stratified nature of graduate training in the American historical profession. I don’t mean to draw broad conclusions from an obviously limited and biased sample, which only reflects the decisions of three Stanford professors as to what they think are the most important recent books in the field. Yet the authors of these books were overwhelmingly trained at prestigious, “top-tier” programs. Does this mean that the products of Harvard and Yale’s programs are the only historians who received the quality training needed to write ground-breaking scholarship? Absolutely not. But the above reading list does imply that where a historian received their graduate education seems to have an outsized ripple effect on the reception and impact of their scholarship.

One answer lies in topic modeling, a method of computational linguistics that attempts to find words that frequently appear together within a text and then group them into clusters. I was introduced to topic modeling through a separate collaborative project that I’ve been working on under the direction of Matthew Jockers (who also recently topic-modeled posts from Day in the Life of Digital Humanities 2010). Matt, ever-generous and enthusiastic, helped me to install MALLET (Machine Learning for LanguagE ToolkiT), developed by Andrew McCallum at UMass as “a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text.” MALLET allows you to feed in a series of text files, which the machine will then process and generate a user-specified number of word clusters it thinks are related topics. I don’t pretend to have a firm grasp on the inner statistical/computational plumbing of how MALLET produces these topics, but in the case of Martha Ballard’s diary, it worked. Beautifully.

With some tinkering, MALLET generated a list of thirty topics comprised of twenty words each, which I then labeled with a descriptive title. Below is a quick sample of what the program “thinks” are some of the topics in the diary:

• MIDWIFERY: birth deld safe morn receivd calld left cleverly pm labour fine reward arivd infant expected recd shee born patient
• CHURCH: meeting attended afternoon reverend worship foren mr famely performd vers attend public supper st service lecture discoarst administred supt
• DEATH: day yesterday informd morn years death ye hear expired expird weak dead las past heard days drowned departed evinn
• GARDENING: gardin sett worked clear beens corn warm planted matters cucumbers gatherd potatoes plants ou sowd door squash wed seeds
• SHOPPING: lb made brot bot tea butter sugar carried oz chees pork candles wheat store pr beef spirit churnd flower
• ILLNESS: unwell mr sick gave dr rainy easier care head neighbor feet relief made throat poorly takeing medisin ts stomach

When I first ran the topic modeler, I was floored. A human being would intuitively lump words like attended, reverend, and worship together based on their meanings. But MALLET is completely unconcerned with the meaning of a word (which is fortunate, given the difficulty of teaching a computer that, in this text, discoarst actually means discoursed). Instead, the program is only concerned with how the words are used in the text, and specifically what words tend to be used similarly.

Besides a remarkably impressive ability to recognize cohesive topics, MALLET also allows us to track those topics across the text. With help from Matt and using the statistical package R, I generated a matrix with each row as a separate diary entry, each column as a separate topic, and each cell as a “score” signaling the relative presence of that topic. For instance, on November 28, 1795, Ballard attended the delivery of Timothy Page’s wife. Consequently, MALLET’s score for the MIDWIFERY topic jumps up significantly on that day. In essence, topic modeling accurately recognized, in a mere 55 words (many abbreviated into a jumbled shorthand), the dominant theme of that entry:

“Clear and pleasant. I am a^t mr Pages, had another fitt of y^e Cramp, not So Severe as that y^e night pas^t. mrss Pages illness Came on a^t Evng and Shee was Deliverd a^t 11^h of a Son which waid 12 lb. I tarried all night She was Some faint a little while after Delivery.”

The power of topic modeling really emerges when we examine thematic trends across the entire diary. As a simple barometer of its effectiveness, I used one of the generated topics that I labeled COLD WEATHER, which included words such as cold, windy, chilly, snowy, and air. When its entry scores are aggregated into months of the year, it shows exactly what one would expect over the course of a typical year:

Cold Weather

As a barometer, this made me a lot more confident in MALLET’s accuracy. From there, I looked at other topics. Two topics seemed to deal largely with HOUSEWORK:

1. house work clear knit wk home wool removd washing kinds pickt helping banking chips taxes picking cleaning pikt pails

2. home clear washt baked cloaths helped washing wash girls pies cleand things room bak kitchen ironed apple seller scolt

When charted over the course of the diary, these two topics trace how frequently Ballard mentions these kinds of daily tasks:

Housework

Both topics moved in tandem, with a high correlation coefficient of 0.83, and both steadily increased as she grew older (excepting a curious divergence in the last several years of the diary). This is somewhat counter-intuitive, as one would think the household responsibilities for an aging grandmother with a large family would decrease over time. Yet this pattern bolsters the argument made by Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, in which she points out that the first half of the diary was “written when her family’s productive power was at its height.” (285) As her children married and moved into different households, and her own husband experienced mounting legal and financial troubles, her daily burdens around the house increased. Topic modeling allows us to quantify and visualize this pattern, a pattern not immediately visible to a human reader.

Even more significantly, topic modeling allows us a glimpse not only into Martha’s tangible world (such as weather or housework topics), but also into her abstract world. One topic in particular leaped out at me:

feel husband unwel warm feeble felt god great fatagud fatagued thro life time year dear rose famely bu good

The most descriptive label I could assign this topic would be EMOTION – a tricky and elusive concept for humans to analyze, much less computers. Yet MALLET did a largely impressive job in identifying when Ballard was discussing her emotional state. How does this topic appear over the course of the diary?

Emotion

Like the housework topic, there is a broad increase over time. In this chart, the sharp changes are quite revealing. In particular, we see Martha more than double her use of EMOTION words between 1803 and 1804. What exactly was going on in her life at this time? Quite a bit. Her husband was imprisoned for debt and her son was indicted by a grand jury for fraud, causing a cascade effect on Martha’s own life – all of which Ulrich describes as “the family tumults of 1804-1805.” (285) Little wonder that Ballard increasingly invoked “God” or felt “fatagued” during this period.

I am absolutely intrigued by the potential for topic modeling in historic source material. In many ways, it seems that Martha Ballard’s diary is ideally suited for this kind of analysis. Short, content-driven entries that usually touch upon a limited number of topics appear to produce remarkably cohesive and accurate topics. In some cases (especially in the case of the EMOTION topic), MALLET did a better job of grouping words than a human reader. But the biggest advantage lies in its ability to extract unseen patterns in word usage. For instance, I would not have thought that the words “informed” or “hear” would cluster so strongly into the DEATH topic. But they do, and not only that, they do so more strongly within that topic than the words dead, expired, or departed. This speaks volumes about the spread of information – in Martha Ballard’s diary, death is largely written about in the context of news being disseminated through face-to-face interactions. When used in conjunction with traditional close reading of the diary and other forms of text mining (for instance, charting Ballard’s social network), topic modeling offers a new and valuable way of interpreting the source material.

I’ll end my post with a topic near and dear to Martha Ballard’s heart: her garden. To a greater degree than any other topic, GARDENING words boast incredible thematic cohesion (gardin sett worked clear beens corn warm planted matters cucumbers gatherd potatoes plants ou sowd door squash wed seeds) and over the course of the diary’s average year they also beautifully depict the fingerprint of Maine’s seasonal cycles:

Gardening

Note: this post is part of an ongoing series detailing my work on text mining Martha Ballard’s diary.