Woman's Exponent: A Quick and Dirty Topic Model

Digital Matters, in collaboration with BYU's Office of Digital Humanities, is embarking on a project exploring Woman's Exponent, a newspaper that ran from the late 19th Century to early 20th Century. We're hoping to launch in conjunction with Better Days 2020, an NPO dedicated to raising awareness of, and celebrating prominent women in Utah History. Woman's Exponent covered the local and national suffrage movement, and tackled definitions of feminism in a Mormon context complicated by polygamy, or "plural marriage."

We conducted a quick and dirty topic model using RStudio on the corpus, which uncovered a few interesting themes that we ran through over its 1872-1914 run. Below in no particular order, you'll find several topics we found interesting and our speculative, surface-level quicktakes.

A few caveats: as the title of this post suggests, this is highly preliminary, speculative in nature, and by no means exhaustive. We're working with a corpus that has about a 50-65% OCR accuracy rate and have made little effort at cleaning up the data. That said, we thought it would be fun and interesting to run the data through a few processes to see what emerged. At best, it's drawing us to ask more pointed and probing questions--such is the nature of the work.

UPDATE: You can access the raw OCR data, in plain text, on our Github page.