This is some textual analysis work I have done under the auspices of a workshop with the Women Writer’s Project, which uses R-language to analysis language in the slavery and Black church collections of Documenting the US South. My work here is in the early stages, but I am exploring Black political language around religion, citizenship, and race-making. The code is derived from a tookit provided by the Northeastern University Women Writer’s Project and adapted from a script that was originally authored by Ben Schmidt. When I am finished with this work, I will publish both my corpus and my code.
The model above explores the ways that Black writers write about God. The most statistically significant synonyms include “almighty,” “lord,” and “heaven” (eliminating the possessive of god).
The model above explores racialized language used by Black writers to describe Blackness. While “white” appears to be an antonym, its inclusion within the model help to confirm that these terms are part of racial descriptors.
