Text Analysis of 19th and 20th Century Etiquette Books Using R

In the interest of contributing to a session on “carrefours/intersections,” I propose a poster reviewing the progress of a text analysis project: during the 2019-2020 academic year, I will be working with more than 250 etiquette books and conduct guides for men, women, and children, published in America between 1848 and 1920, the goal being to identify the ideal American woman as she was written and revised between the landmark convention at Seneca Falls and the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The visual representation of this project will highlight the intersection between digital resources and long-form academic projects in the humanities, emphasizing the accessibility of these digital methods to graduate students as well as the potential benefit of using code to analyze large swaths of extratextual data.