This repository contains the text files for interviews from the Scranton Oral History Project. These oral histories are also on file at the Pennsylvania State Archives. Here we include the oral history files as .csv files, in the form that they are incorporated into our ongoing text analysis research on these oral histories. These .csvs are also provided for reuse by other researchers.
This repository also includes the R script files for data analysis on word and bigram frequencies, as well as other text analysis methods. Data analysis methods use the tidy text approach outlined by Silge and Robinson (2017) and draw on code modified from their examples. This includes the text cleaning and analysis code.
Finally, we include a stopword list and sentiment tagging lexicon for the Scranton oral histories. The custom stopword list includes abbreviations, names, and colloquial terms that were not picked up by general stopword lists. The sentiment tagging lexicon includes the annotated tag list (annoted by Paul Shackel) for the categories family, community, and work as they apply to the Scranton oral history context. We encourage other researchers to use and improve these tools.
Results from these analyses are published in Brown and Shackel 2023.