My team had a weekly meeting on Friday, July 21st. We had finished our preliminary source documentation, compiling all student newspaper articles (1978-2023) from each of our schools that included the word “affirmative action.” This week, we sorted out the articles, those about affirmative action in college admissions to be kept, and those about affirmative action in hiring to be removed from our folder. We did this to narrow down the scope of our project.
Then we had to convert the format of our articles before importing them to Voyant. Since the newspaper issues from my school, The Amherst Student, were in PDF format, I had to extract specific articles and save them in Word format. This was extremely time consuming because when I pasted content from PDF files into a Word document, the original formatting changed. Some words and paragraphs simply went missing, and I had to manually type them. I wonder if there is automated text extraction software designed specifically for old newspapers and/or manuscripts.
After extracting text from our sources, Kaitlyn and I conducted textual analysis using Voyant. She compared and contrasted the four colleges’ sources, while I took a closer look at each of them using the “Trends” tool. First, I visualized the frequency of the word “affirmative action” in each year’s news articles. Second, I visualized the frequency of different racial groups: Black, white, Asian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous. Lastly, I visualized the frequency of words that constitute a college applicant’s identity: race, class, gender, athlete, and legacy. The results can be seen here, and I look forward to receiving feedback from Professor Serrano.
While Kaitlyn and I were working on Voyant, Meghan and Ed created a draft timeline that includes major moments and events related to affirmative action. We are planning to have a meeting tomorrow and share what we have done with each other.
