When trying to do the homework for this week’s class I was very excited about the prospect of trying out Wordle, particularly with my Hist 499 paper which was 20 pages of text without the bibliography, however to my great disappointment I could not get it to work on my computer 🙁   … I will try using a different computer later on this week and see if I can get it to work ( if so I will then post my findings!).

I explored Time Magazine Corpus and found it fairly interesting though a little confusing to figure out the way to compare data sets by years. I did some searches about how often the term “World War” was used and the result was huge. Then when I was playing around with creating searches to find out how often Time Magazine mentioned women in the workforce during the WWII time period the site stopped allowing me to generate requests and said I could not use it anymore until I registered for the site. This was frustrating because I did not want to have another site I had to 1.) register for an account. 2.) have to create a username and password for and 3.) then have a site that would send me random emails which I do not want, thus I did not sign up for it and could not finish investigating the frequency of Time Magazine mentioning, in some way or form, women in the workforce in years before WWI compared to those during and after it.

In my third attempt at conducting research with the websites/tools listed to explore and use for this week’s assignment, I finally had more success. I used the Google books Ngram Viewer and compared the number of times the words “etiquette”, “manners”, “politeness”, and “women” were found in books from the 1750 -1950 (time period ranging from a little before the American Revolution to a little after the end of WWII). This search interested me as women’s etiquette, etiquette manuals, and guides to manners is a topic I have heavily researched for my History 300 and History 499 papers. I found it interesting to see how the term “manners” was used much more in the published works than the term “etiquette”. The Ngram showed the topic of etiquette and manners was more popular right before the American Revolution during which it hit a serious decline. Near the end of the war there was a small increase in the topic’s popularity but it never reached the same level as before the war. This suggests that manners and etiquette were not a concern for the American colonists from 1775-1880’s and that books/manuals on these topics were not published and subsequently not read very much during this time period. Thus, an argument can be made using this data that the American people were otherwise preoccupied during the war and did not have time to spend reading or writing about manners, etc. or did not have the resources or desire to do so. The American colonists were using their time in other ways, most likely in supporting the troops fighting in the war, instead of writing an reading about the rules of politeness. A similar patter could be seen in the Ngram, on a much smaller scale however, when looking at the time period from WWI to the end of WWII. The results of my search of these words (a.k.a. the Ngram I conducted and am referencing this post) can be found at: Etiquette/Manners/Politeness/Women – Google Ngram Viewer Results. Over all I thought the Ngram Viewer was cool yet I wish one could see a breakdown of the information in text form and not just visually in the form a line graph.