Mary Reynolds Textual Analysis

By Yuetong (May) Zhou ’28 and Hope Yu ’26

One important aspect of Reynolds’s story is her role in the American missionary enterprise of the early twentieth century. As her letters demonstrate, she worked and lived close at hand with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and with prominent missionaries like Luella Miner, Nellie Russell, and the Ament family (William Scott Ament). Moreover, Reynolds grew up in Sibley, Iowa and then here in Northfield, MN and thus was shaped by her childhood education and faith. We chose Voyant to conduct a textual analysis of the entire Reynolds corpus in order to isolate and analyze specific trends in her language and outlook on China, the US, Japan, and Hawaii.

Voyant Tools is a website that allows the user to input a document and conduct a variety of textual analyses, including word frequency, creation of a cirrus, word mandalas, and geographical locators. Voyant was created by Geoffrey Martin Rockwell, Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, alongside Stéfan Sinclair, who was Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. The primary goal of Voyant is to allow accessible text analysis for any document at hand.

The Reynolds Corpus – Cirrus Cloud

To begin, when the entire Reynolds corpus (as in, all of her writing) is entered into Voyant to create a large word cloud based upon frequency (called a “cirrus”) we see that her two most common words are ‘Chinese’ and ‘work.’ Evidently, this reflects both her role in China, which she often refers to as her work, and the focus of many of her letters: the Chinese people.

Other highlighted words include “women” and “girls” which denotes an interesting aspect of Reynolds’s narrative. She wanted to tutor girls, even stating how she decreased her rates for any Chinese girl who wanted to learn English, but none ever came. This speaks to a larger point of interest in Reynolds’ story: she only ever taught male pupils, even when most American missionary women were sent specifically to China to target Chinese women.

Frequently appearing words such as “mission” and “English” emphasize the moral and intellectual significance of her work. Other common words like “Carleton” and “school” reflect that she is not only an individual educator, but also a representative of academic and religious institutions. 

This word cloud is only the beginning of what tools like Voyant can show us, but already you get a sense of the word choice Reynolds was using in her letters.

This graph plots Reynolds’s use of the word “Chinese” over all 12 of her letters. Her letters are currently placed in almost all chronological order with a few guessed. Nevertheless, we can see a sharp spike around her third through fifth letters in the use of the word “Chinese.” This makes sense for her most thorough descriptions of Peking (Beijing) and the broader people around her occur in her first couple of letters.

The “Dreamscape” tool is another fun feature from Voyant, though perhaps a bit less accurate. We are showing Reynolds’s letters in the context of this analysis to you because we want to demonstrate the importance of careful digital analysis, rather than just blind application. This map shows a trajectory from Port Arthur, Texas, to the Midwest, to the West coast, off to China, then to London and even provides the viewer with the quotes these locations were determined from. However, with some interrogation, we see that her use of the word “London” stems from the London Mission in Peking, rather than the location itself. This “Port Arthur” which she talks about in the context of mines, is actually Port Arthur in Manchuria where the siege of Port Arthur – one of the most violent conflicts of the Russo-Japanese War – had taken place only a couple of months before. Again, context is necessary to decipher digital formulations. See our “Spatial Analysis” page for more on Reynolds’s journey.