Final Digital Scholarship Project

The final version of my Clio Wired Project, «Shifts in Physical Culture,» is online now. It has been quite the process getting everything formatted correctly–I realized after I presented that I had made a mistake and did not included all of the articles when I ran the topic modeling software so I had to adjust that. Overall the results are the same–there is a definite change in the discussion of physical culture between 1932 and 1937.

I added one other element to my project to help support my argument.  I used the Google N-Gram viewer to show how the term «physical culture» has occurred in books from 1800 to 2000. The result confirms what I suspected–there is a large drop in the term beginning in 1935. The graph doesn’t help me answer why, although I have my suspicions, but it does give me a starting point for further research.

Although, I think what I learned from this project is, first, that topic modeling is incredibly useful and a really neat tool for  analyzing text. Secondly, I need to experiment with looking at physical culture on a much larger scale using topic modeling. (although thats a whole other–big–project.) Adding some of the digitized books from online archives such as google books and HathiTrust would allow me to look more closely at physical culture as a trend. I think incorporating some text from health and diet gurus such as Bernarr Macfadden would make for a really interesting analysis.

Its been a great semester–see you all in the Spring for Round 2!