american_constitutional_praxis

This repository uses text-as-data methods alongside traditional primary source reading to analyze early American state constitutions. The R scripts create a function to scrape and clean the constitutional text, run sentiment analysis, calculate tf-idf, and perform LDA. This is a work-in-progress. To execute the text analysis of early state constitutions, simply open and run each R script. No data is needed as the texts are scraped during the analysis. The goal of this analysis is to show that the US constitution was not cut from whole cloth, but developed from the state constitutions that preceded it, especially New York and Maryland's state constitutions. This is still a work in progress, so any comments would be very helpful.