Project researching The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) Constitution and other documents for pedagogical policies perpetuating Lost Cause propaganda during Reconstruction.
This website will be a repository for the beginning of my thesis about Reconstruction pedagogy. My thesis will look at textbooks published in the early 20th century while also looking at policy and documentation from The United Daughters of the Confederacy. My goal will be to find policy in UDC's documents and align them with the textbooks used in the 20th century. Eventually I will begin to look for Lost Cause mythology in those textbooks and in UDC policy. I would like to look at states education policies during the 20th century to see how history and Reconstruction was discussed and taught. The documents include the meeting minutes, convention notes and UDC's constitution.
- The United Daughters of the Confederacy Constitution, 1895.
- Eppes, Susan Through Some Eventful Years, 1845.
- Minutes from the 32nd Annual Convention of The United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1925.
- A Measuring Rod to Test Textbooks and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries by Mildred Lewis Rutherford
- January 26, 2021: Changed direction of project goals after a consultation with the History Librarian to look more pedagogical influences of Lost Cause pedagogy and the effect The United Daughters of the Confederacy had on current Reconstruction pedagogy.
- January 28, 2021: Looking for documentation and sources to use support my research for my thesis and this project.
- January 30, 2021: Using the database History Vault to find documents.
- February 7, 2021: Uploaded new documents.
- February 8, 2021: Cleaning documents. Deleted NACW Papers and renamed project.
- February 9, 2021: Uploaded new document, will be one or two main text I will work with.
- February 12, 2021: Meeting with DH Librarian Sarah Stanley to help understand Sublime Text and cleaning up data. Downloaded Sublime Text, uploaded files, cleaned up data for 2 textbooks.
- February 15, 2021: Meeting with DH Librarian Sarah Stanley to help understanding tabular data, downloaded OpenRefined, made table.
- February 16, 2021: Met with DH Librarian Sarah Stanley and Will Hanley to discuss project, progression. Need to find more textbooks. Updated metadata about Through some eventful years in OpenRefine/Breve and made very simple tables to play around with digital tools.
- February 20, 2021: Found two textbooks and UDC Meeting Minutes that discussed textbook adoption.
- February 22, 2021: Met with DH Librarian Sarah Stanley where we discussed cleaning the meeting minutes document and Sarah helped me understand how to clean up the document in SublimeText. I decided to table the treasury notes on OpenRefine.
- February 23, 2021: Cleaning up meeting minutes text and trying to make a table (exercise 5) in OpenRefine, but so far unsuccessful. I think I'll have more luck with it comes to text mining, especially if I'm able to upload the additional textbooks I found.
- February 28, 2021: Began playing around with website building and tried to build a website using The Programming Historian 'Build a Static Site' page with no luck. Began building a Google site page, unpublished and cannot share.
- March 1, 2021: Added GitHub.io page.
- March 9, 2021: Tried topic modeling with Voyant. Wrong brief blog (below) about reference models.
- March 15, 2021: Wikidata and Wikipedia information on the topics of the Reconstruction Era and The United Daughters of the Confederacy.
- March 16, 2021: Added Exercise 10 summary (below).
- March 21, 2021: Began working on tabbed data following meeting with Dr. Hanley. Working in Excel and collecting metadata from "Through The Some Eventful Years" by Susan Bradford Eppes. This is one of the textbooks approved by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Collecting metadata about the chapters (title, word count, author, date, etc). then going through each chapter and collection data about the rhetorical aspects of each chapter.
- March 22, 2021: Continiung work from March 21st.
- March 23, 2021: Continiung work from March 21st.
- March 26-30, 2021: Contining to collect data from Eppes textbook. Meeting with DH Librarian Sarah Stanley to help building website.
- view Text Cleaning.md document
- I used State of the Union Messages from The American Presidency Project for this exercise. I put the text of the messages from 1865 to 1870 in Sublime Text, then started a spreadsheet that contained metadata such as the date of the message, who gave the message, and how many times certain words such as 'Union', 'Confederation', 'Reconstruction' were used in each message. After making a table I updated it onto Voyant.
- In reference to Underwood, I understand what he's trying to do in regards to gender and genre with his topic modeling. The context he uses and describes in chapter 4 seem like they are useful if you have a clear understanding of what your research question is and how using predictive modeling can be useful. What I don't understand is who is this for? Who has these questions about gender in genre and if those questions are there, wouldn't be it just as useful (maybe more) to read the book? I don't understand what his tables are for. I've uploaded this bried blog to my md record as opposed to a website because I've haven't set up the website.
- I followed the directions for the assignment and found Wikidata to be a useful and easy-to-use resource. I played around with Wikidata using the terms 'Reconstruction Era' and 'United Daughters of the Confederacy' and found the queries useful. I added one reference to the UDC Wikidata, a reference URL to the Encyclopedia Virginia ID. When searching the term 'Reconstruction Era' as a significant event, 8 results showed. The results were all names. I downloaded a CSV file of the names, but I'm unsure of the usefulness of this information.