The results, while interesting, left a lot to be desired. Any sweeping conclusion about the nature of Blues or Early Old Time country music cannot be drawn from them as they stand now. Clustering works best when scanning a catalog of hundreds of thousands of words. This project analyzed roughly 600 songs total, but because both tests were kept separate, those 600 song were reduced to two tests of 300 songs a piece. In short, as large a collection as it might be, it needs to be larger for the two softwares to work effectively. Those 600 songs need to be turned into 6,000 to draw the types of conclusions I was looking for.
But that does not mean that this project has been entirely futile. The initial idea for the project came from Ben Wynne's In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music, but it has also been impacted by Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. In it, Wald suggests that blues music is inherently forward thinking while Old Time country is, maybe not necessarily backward thinking, but at least more nostalgic. Trying to quantitatively prove this assertion lingered over the project from the start. Proving it to be true, in my mind at least, would say a lot about how Southern music reflected the larger cultural and ideological themes of the "lost cause" and the black freedom struggle. I acknowledge that some would see this as a stretch, but I hope that all would recognize its importance--or at the very least, its ingenuity.
At first glance, the results seem to do nothing to advance this line of inquiry, but I continued to come back to the word "going." In the Blues lyrics it occurred 641 times while only occurring 208 times in the Old Time data set. The discrepancy could very well be explained by an unknown variable, but such a large discrepancy led me to believe that there was more to it than that. "Going," after all, is a forward thinking word, a word that in its very usage is connected to the future. Using Antconc and its clustering capabilities, I then thought that the context of the word could tell me more. Below are the clusters.
Blues:
Going: going to run, going back to, going to get, going to be, going to the, going to jump, going to tell, going to have, going to leave, going to need.
Old Time:
Going: going to, going to marry, going to the, going to meet, going to , going to tell, going to be, going to wear.
These results do not really tell us much, but I thought it was interesting that "Going to run" registered so many hits in the blues category. I then questioned how each genre approached the most efficient method of travel at the turn of the 20th century--the railroad.
When the word "train" is clustered, the top Blues results are "Train ain't" and "train don't" while Old Time returned clusters that were much more positive. Its top returns were "Train comes along" and "train a coming." Now, as to what explains this finding, who knows. It opens up a number of other lines of inquiry that are all well beyond the scope of this project, but a digital project such as this in conjunction with other resources could go a long way in making sense of some of these differences. All that can be said from this data is that if the blues was a forward thinking genre, as Wald suggests, the early blues artists did not see the train as integral part of their future.
Of course, there are hardline historians who will say that this type of analysis is not history because it does not adhere to a traditional methodology. To that, I would probably agree in this specific case. Much more work still needs to be done. I do believe, though, that this problem highlights the inter-disciplinary nature of textual and rhetorical analysis. While this specific study may not offer much a historian could work with, it does open up a range of possibilities for a rhetorician or literary scholar as it unlocks a cache of rhetorical data about, in this case, the metaphor that is the railroad.
Ultimately, this one conclusion comes up woefully short of the project's initial goals, but it does reveal the types of conclusions that can be made from using quantitative text analysis softwares. Going forward, I would like to expand the breadth of the project, turning the 300 lyrics to 2, 000 or 3,000 lyrics. I would also like to break from the self imposed generational limits put on the data. Broadening the project's scope will, I believe, net the kind of results we are capable of getting.
But that does not mean that this project has been entirely futile. The initial idea for the project came from Ben Wynne's In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music, but it has also been impacted by Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. In it, Wald suggests that blues music is inherently forward thinking while Old Time country is, maybe not necessarily backward thinking, but at least more nostalgic. Trying to quantitatively prove this assertion lingered over the project from the start. Proving it to be true, in my mind at least, would say a lot about how Southern music reflected the larger cultural and ideological themes of the "lost cause" and the black freedom struggle. I acknowledge that some would see this as a stretch, but I hope that all would recognize its importance--or at the very least, its ingenuity.
At first glance, the results seem to do nothing to advance this line of inquiry, but I continued to come back to the word "going." In the Blues lyrics it occurred 641 times while only occurring 208 times in the Old Time data set. The discrepancy could very well be explained by an unknown variable, but such a large discrepancy led me to believe that there was more to it than that. "Going," after all, is a forward thinking word, a word that in its very usage is connected to the future. Using Antconc and its clustering capabilities, I then thought that the context of the word could tell me more. Below are the clusters.
Blues:
Going: going to run, going back to, going to get, going to be, going to the, going to jump, going to tell, going to have, going to leave, going to need.
Old Time:
Going: going to, going to marry, going to the, going to meet, going to , going to tell, going to be, going to wear.
These results do not really tell us much, but I thought it was interesting that "Going to run" registered so many hits in the blues category. I then questioned how each genre approached the most efficient method of travel at the turn of the 20th century--the railroad.
When the word "train" is clustered, the top Blues results are "Train ain't" and "train don't" while Old Time returned clusters that were much more positive. Its top returns were "Train comes along" and "train a coming." Now, as to what explains this finding, who knows. It opens up a number of other lines of inquiry that are all well beyond the scope of this project, but a digital project such as this in conjunction with other resources could go a long way in making sense of some of these differences. All that can be said from this data is that if the blues was a forward thinking genre, as Wald suggests, the early blues artists did not see the train as integral part of their future.
Of course, there are hardline historians who will say that this type of analysis is not history because it does not adhere to a traditional methodology. To that, I would probably agree in this specific case. Much more work still needs to be done. I do believe, though, that this problem highlights the inter-disciplinary nature of textual and rhetorical analysis. While this specific study may not offer much a historian could work with, it does open up a range of possibilities for a rhetorician or literary scholar as it unlocks a cache of rhetorical data about, in this case, the metaphor that is the railroad.
Ultimately, this one conclusion comes up woefully short of the project's initial goals, but it does reveal the types of conclusions that can be made from using quantitative text analysis softwares. Going forward, I would like to expand the breadth of the project, turning the 300 lyrics to 2, 000 or 3,000 lyrics. I would also like to break from the self imposed generational limits put on the data. Broadening the project's scope will, I believe, net the kind of results we are capable of getting.