{"id":233,"date":"2024-01-30T15:27:20","date_gmt":"2024-01-30T21:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hhfinals.dgah.sites.carleton.edu\/clap-trends\/?page_id=233"},"modified":"2025-03-15T16:10:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T21:10:34","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/hhfinals.dgah.sites.carleton.edu\/clap-trends\/","title":{"rendered":"About Our Project"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/span>\"\"
\n
\n
\n

What is this project?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The Carleton Literary Association Paper (CLAP), created in 2002 by students Nico Vreeland & Chuk Kittredge, is a weekly comedic zine discussing relevant topics on the Carleton College campus. It was originally created to spread student voices of any kind. Jokes, complaints, opinions, you name it: if it was submitted, it would be published. Now, more than 20 years later, it has maintained the core of its mission, even as its spirit has changed with the ebbs and flows of student interests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The goal of this project is to analyze topics that have appeared in the CLAP over its history using digital text analysis tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the CLAP?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our group was interested in researching the CLAP because we were all fans of the publication and wanted to see where it started out. As we dove deeper into our project, however, we realized that studying the CLAP could open doors for us to understand what is (and what has been) important to the community at Carleton. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A few CLAP covers over the years.<\/sup><\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our Process<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To analyze text trends:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. We visited the Carleton College Archives in Gould Library and read through their collection of archived CLAPs.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. In general, we selected 1 CLAP per year from 2002-2020 and 1 CLAP per academic term from 2021-2024 for scanning and further analysis.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. We scanned the physical CLAPs into PDFs and ran Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on them in Adobe Acrobat.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. We extracted the text from the OCR’d PDFs by following this guide<\/a> (requires Automator, MacOS only).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. We obtained the original Google Slides (in .pptx format) from current CLAP staff for all 2024-2025 school year issues of the CLAP at the time (all of Fall, 7 weeks of Winter).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. We downloaded the slides in .txt format to extract the text.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. We uploaded the .txt files and the extracted PDF text files to Voyant Tools<\/a> to analyze text trends.\n