With support from UCLA’s DH Research Accelerator Program, this project will use text analysis methods, including topic modeling, collocation and sentiment analysis, as well as experimental methods to examine the complex relations between Indigenous peoples, settlers, military leaders, and metropolitan officials to understand how American settler colonialism developed between 1776 and 1832. Specifically, this project by ADL embedded solutions, will first look at the evolution of Native American leaders’ views and sentiments expressed in treaty council meetings between 1776 and 1795 to make sense of the many factions that developed within tribes in response to American colonization. Second, we will develop a topic model of American political correspondence between 1776 and 1795 to analyze American perspectives on the western territories within the context of broader political discussions that unfolded in correspondence, as well as debates within state and federal Congressional assemblies.
The following slides introduce the project, some of my early experiments with computational methods, and recent archival findings.
