FURTHER ANALYSIS
CORRESPONDENCE DOCUMENTS OF
CONTINENTAL CONGRESS MEMBERS
Click on the image above to explore an interactive topic model of the congressmen correspondence.
By the use of collocate analysis, bigram analysis and topic modelling, I was able to extract common words and key figures while understanding the Gnadenhutten massacre in context of the congressman correspondence. Collocate analysis was conducted by looking at the most "distinctive" words to each document via Voyant Tools, and some of these terms referred to people with major roles in Congress during this period. They had a lot of collocates. Different kinds of papers were frequently referred in Volume 6/1782 as significant to conversations, and perhaps these would be useful to investigate as well. Interactive topic modelling helped identify some mention of information networks and armed violence in two of the topics, which would be useful, especially in connection with the newspaper archives. While there was no mention of the massacre specifically, these documents shed light onto the conversations among Anglo-Americans making key decisions during this time period.
19TH CENTURY NEWSPAPERS
ON GNADENHUTTEN MASSACRE
Through the use of the visualization maps tool in Recogito, an annotation and visualization software, I was able to find the geographical locations of all the places mentioned in the newspaper documents that I used. I first had to compress all the newspaper documents into one print text document. Then, I uploaded them onto Recogito. Once I uploaded them onto Recogito, I utilized the Name Entity Recognition feature to find words that could count as being geographical locations from around the world. From there I manually looked over the words that the NER feature highlighted and made sure to confirm all the geographical locations found in the document. Recogito was then able to create a map with all the geographical locations mentioned in the newspaper articles.
Through the use of the mapping tool, I was able to examine which locations were mentioned in the newspaper articles. The Gnadenhutten massacre occurred in Gnadenhutten, Ohio which is only one of the many locations found using the Recogito maps tool in the newspaper documents. The newspaper documents not only talk about the massacre in particular, they also talked about the violence, killings, war, and murders that happened in other locations. The location points on the map show that many locations, that had endured some form of violence, were in close proximity to the Gnadenhutten Ohio site during the Revolutionary War. Violence was thus not limited to the Gnadenhutten massacre location. During the Revolutionary War, many locations around the world were affected by the violence that the war brought. So although the Moravian Indians took a neutral stance during the war, they still were not shielded from the natural acts of violence brought by the Revolutionary war which explains why they were massacred regardless of their religion, neutral stance, or ethnicity.
19TH CENTURY NEWSPAPERS
ON GNADENHUTTEN MASSACRE
I used the Collocation tool in Voyant Tools to examine which words were most associated with words such as kill, murder, violence, and massacre. I discovered that often these words were found in the text near location words such as Ohio, Sandusky, Detroit, Pennsylvania, and Canada. This discovery further supports the theory that different forms of violence occurred in many places around the United States, not just the Gnadenhutten massacre location. Therefore, the Moravian Christian Indians were never going to be spared from the killings and violence that happened to them