Throughout the last few weeks, my peers and I have been transcribing testimonies from the Jamaica Royal Commission report, a process and a document that I described in my last blog post. Collectively, we have now transcribed over 100 testimonies. By transcribing those testimonies and converting them to a digital format, we are now able to analyze it using a text visualization tool called Voyant. Voyant allows us to find trends and correlations among frequencies of words and phrases in the text. To do this, we’ve put all of the transcriptions completed thus far into one singular document, and pasted it all into Voyant. Using the different visualization tools, we can “deform” the text, or see it from new abstract points of view. By deforming the text and performing a distant read of it, we can get a better understanding of the content of the text objectively by observing patterns and relationships that might go unnoticed in a close reading.
A Recurring Theme
From this process, I discovered that the term “house” was the second-most commonly used word across all of the testimonies, which felt unexpected. Of all of the stories depicted in these testimonies, why would “house” be mentioned so often? I decided to focus my analysis on that term, so I first used the “links” tool to see what words most frequently occur in proximity to “house.” Using that tool, I found that the terms “shot,” “took,” “soldiers,” “burn,” and “burnt” were included as
some of the most correlated terms. Prior to this analysis, I knew that a major aspect of the Morant Bay Rebellion was the burning of many Jamaicans’ homes, but seeing how frequently people spoke about their homes and their subsequent destructions within the testimonies made it clear just how much loss occurred.
Correlation Findings
I wanted to study this link even further, so I used the “correlations” tool to see which terms were most statistically significant in their correlation to the term “house.” The graph below demonstrates the amount of correlation and the statistical significance of the relation between each word. A correlation number that sits between 0 and 1 indicates that the two words have a direct relationship and follow one another. In terms of significance, a correlation is considered “statistically significant” if the value is less than .05, which indicates that “disturbed,” “hid,” “cart,” “burn,” and “frightened” all have a proven relationship with the term “house” within these transcripts.
What Does This Mean?
In both visualizations, the term “house” is surrounded by words with negative connotations– “burn,” “disturbed,” “took,” and “shot.” One’s house is supposed to be a safe place; a refuge and a shelter from the dangers of the outside world. For the citizens of Morant Bay, that was taken from them in the blink of an eye. For some, their homes were literally destroyed and burnt to the ground, but for others, the sanctity of the home was still broken by looting rioters and soldiers, despite the fact that the physical structure remained standing.