Data Visualization: Mary Reynolds & Voyant

Part of my role in our Mary Reynolds Letters group project is to process the letters into digital formats. This included the scanning of each document and making separate transcriptions of each letter. May and I decided to put these transcription through Voyant to get a better grasp on what sort of word choice or rhetoric was popular in which letter. I thought this might provide insight into changes in Reynolds’s outlook on China and her role in the American Mission Board.

Data: the Letters

Here is an example of her letters. This is the first page of a letter to the Carleton Mission Board. It was written on March 28, 1905, a couple months in to her stay in Peking (Beijing), China. While her words are legible, they are not particularly easy to read, especially for people who do not speak English as their first language. Although I personally think that reading cursive is good for you, it is not easy and can distract from the actual message at hand. Moreover, since this is a double sided document, the in on the back can easily bleed through. In the archives, David and I worked to color the scan with the least incursion of the back text. Nevertheless, a typed transcript would help read her letter.

Here is what this letter looks like in transcript form:

All twelve letters have been transcribed by either me or Claire Sniffen ’26 (she was the other person interested in the Reynolds Letters in HIST355 and we worked in the archives together earlier this term). Thus, with text in hand, we are now ready to input the transcripts into Voyant for some analysis.

Tool & Data Visualization: Voyant

Here is this single March 28, 1905 letter in Voyant. Already, just on the home page, we can see some interesting trends. Firstly, the Cirrus highlights terms such as “work,” “missionaries,” “home,” and “Carleton.” For someone who has never heard of Reynolds, this is a great way to introduce them to the bigger themes of her life and story.

Taking these larger trends, I first did a relative frequency search for “home.” This visualization demonstrates that home is a thing that Reynolds is thinking about. For missionaries, letters from and to home were often their lifelines to feeling connected to family and friends they would not otherwise see for many years. The frequency in which they received letters was important to their social standings within the mission and could often cause conflict if one missionary in a compound received more than others. When writing home, it was important to emphasize connection and relevance, and missionaries, including Reynolds, would often ask to be responded to quickly (See the work of Jane Hunter and Patricia Hill if you want to learn more about about American missionary women in China).

Another group of Reynolds’s documents that Carleton has is a couple pages of quotations from her letters. This document, also written in cursive, is done by an unknown author at an unknown date! However, we know the quotes themselves come from between October 1904 and October 1905. These excerpts show some Reynolds’s arrival in China, alongside her earlier stops in Hawaii and Japan. Her rhetoric here is not always kind towards the people she meets along the way. Part of my argument in my HIST355 paper (on Reynolds’s letters) is that her tutoring sessions led her to change her perspective on Chinese people as her usage of racist and disparaging rhetoric stops after she’s spent a couple months in Beijing. Nevertheless, her initial opinions are shaped by early twentieth-century American opinions on the East.

Just from the initial set up on Voyant, the focus of this letter on her description of China and its people are evident. As you can see in the relative frequency visualization, the later part of her letters are focused on describing the Chinese people. This letter is especially interesting because it includes a little drawing of a rickshaw. This demonstrates the one downfall of such a text-based analysis as the Voyant analysis does not catch her drawing. This was one of the reasons it was so important to us to include the actual pictures of the letters themselves.

WordPress: Visualization Style

For our actual product, however, we wanted to do a Voyant analysis on the entire corpus of Reynolds letters, to understand changes in her perspective and rhetoric over her year-long time in Peking (Beijing). We then uploaded this into a page in our website, titled “Textual Analysis.” Here we provide a variety of Voyant analyses alongside descriptions of our conclusions and how they connect to larger trends in missionary history. In this page, to help viewers who would not have had previous experience with Voyant, we separated out each analysis to one or two word frequency visualizations and began with a Cirrus, to get the viewer used to how a text analysis might work. The more complicated data visualizations went more into the bottom of the page. We also began with an explanation of what Voyant is and why we chose to use it for Reynolds’s letters.