Flashback: My MA Thesis (USLoCo)

I’ve begun a little project of reorganizing my website; namely, my Academic Research page. It’s a good thing. It’s been spurred by the fact that I’ll have things to add over the course of the next few months.

But more projects and articles and so forth mean the whole page could get cluttered! How many interactive dashboards can I put on one HTML page? That’s not a challenge I want, so I’m doing a little archiving instead.

So, this post is the first of several blog posts forthcoming. Each will house a brief description and overview of one of my digital projects from the past five or six years. In this case, I’ll be touching on one of my favorites: my MA thesis from my time in the Literary Studies program at Washington State University.

The U.S. Local Color Corpus (USLoCo)

My MA thesis at Washington State University involved theorizing and constructing the U.S. Local Color Corpus (USLoCo)–a dataset meant to assist in the research processes of scholars interested in U.S. local color or regionalist fictions. In its current iteration, USLoCo is composed of 730 short stories, novellas, and serialized novel chapters that were published between 1865 and 1920. A total of 46 authors are represented in the corpus. Each text is categorized by the author’s race and gender and by various regional settings (by state, subregion, and ecoregion). All texts have been cleaned and saved as .txt files, making them ready for computational analysis. You can download the corpus from my GitHub repository. More information about it can be found in my MA thesis, published via ProQuest. You can also explore the corpus in Voyant (see below). This project is open-source and available for anyone interested.

The U.S. Local Color Corpus (USLoCo) in Voyant