Thesis
Negotiating Sovereignty Within the British Atlantic: Text Mining the Discourse of Colonial South Carolinian Elites 1769-1776
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
05/2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005573
Abstract
Within this new age of digital everything, scholarly work has been greatly changed due to information access, new media, and computational abilities that far exceed that of the human mind. This change in research and dissemination practices has impacted every field of study, but true to our nature, history departments have been slow to innovate, especially in the ways we do research. However, this author desired to create a work of historic scholarship that embraced and experimented with digital tools, rather than continue in the tradition of archival trips and double-spaced Word Docs. The resulting thesis used publicly accessible digital text mining software, provided through the Hathi Trust Research Center, to analyze thousands of writings of Colonial South Carolinian elites created during the Eve of the American Revolution, 1769-1776. The results of this digital born research were then placed and analyzed within a web based Scalar Book environment where the digital nature of the work could be showcased and interacted with in new and interesting ways. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is threefold: to explore the use of text mining tools to do historical research and create novel arguments, to demonstrate for the reader the ways in which this digital born and based history can be done, and to expose differences in the language used and motivations behind conservative and radical South Carolinian elites during the crucible that was the "imperial crisis." While the first two objectives are entirely subject to the individual reader the third can be summarized as radical South Carolinian elites invoked the rhetoric of the Enlightenment and "the rights of man" consistently throughout their writings when debating the sovereignty of the British Empire and their position within it, while their conservative counterparts did not. These differences in language and political favor for and against the Empire among these historical actors being based firmly on their level of material dependence on that imperial association. The actual thesis can be viewed here: https://cdsc.libraries.wsu.edu/scalar/robinsonmathesis.
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Details
- Title
- Negotiating Sovereignty Within the British Atlantic
- Creators
- Cole S. Robinson
- Contributors
- Lawrence B. A. Hatter (Chair)Jennifer Thigpen (Committee Member) - Washington State University, History, Department ofRobert R McCoy (General Contributor) - Washington State University, History, Department of
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- History, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 99
- Identifiers
- 99901053937801842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis