This site was created in March 2023 as a final project for DGAH 110: Hacking the Humanities, taught by Austin Mason at Carleton College. The project was collaboratively authored by Julia Bartlett, Maddy Brown, Becca Helmstetter, and Angie Pius.

Datamaster: Julia Bartlett

Analyst: Maddy Brown

Documenter: Becca Helmstetter

Webmaster: Angie Pius

Sources

All of our Carletonian data is sourced from the Carleton College Archives’ digital Carletonian collections, which are accessible to the public here. We downloaded PDFs of the front pages of selected issues (October, February, and May) for every year from 1877-2019 and sorted them into folders by year; those are available on Google Drive here.

Some data was also sourced from Google Books Ngram Viewer, which allowed us to compare trends Carletonian word usage over time to trends in word usage in English language books over time.

To learn more specifically about our sources and ethical considerations, along with full citations for our data sources, check out this page.

Processes

After downloading PDFs for our filtered sample of front pages, we were able to extract the text layers into a plaintext file with the help of David Bliss (Carleton’s digital archivist). With his Python scripts for PDF combination and text extraction, we ended up with 136 text files to upload into Voyant.

We extracted certain datasets from Voyant to analyze, and created visualizations on Flourish. Additionally, we documented editorial changes in the Carletonian over time, such as name and title font changes.

More detailed information on our process can be found here.

Presentation

Our hope is that this site will serve as a resource for understanding the Carletonian as a forum for community discourse from its foundation to the present moment.

To see a walkthrough of our findings, visit this page.

This project is hosted on WordPress with the theme “Archeo.”