Technical and Theoretical Research
Technical: implement text mining techniques in reports and papers towards the evolution of the project.
Theoretical: analyze the repository's materials to develop an understanding of the interconnectivity of social, scientific, economic, political and religious networks of the time.
“Abydos,” The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project.
Text Mining Visualizations
This paper seeks to identify trends in words and phrasing surrounding the identification of people in volume 17 of the Emma B. Andrews diary. I analyzed both the XML marked up versions as well as the plain text to gain a wider perspective. I categorized persons by whether they were identified with a prefix, without a prefix, identified as a group (such as 'The Kelly's") and people identified secondhand, or anecdotally by the author. I studied each group in Voyant, looking at the preceding and following 15 words surrounding the person in order to identify trends that will help us shape our relational analysis method.
I created this map to look at trends across the entire volume. Here is a breakdown of the contents:
•People identified total instances: 167
•total people identified 76
•blue= people identified with prefixes "mr, ms, capt, lady, etc.
•98 instances ("mr and mrs" and 'm and mme" combined)
•yellow= people identified without prefixes (theo, eléna, harry)
•65 instances
•green= people identified in groups, such as "The Kellys"
•4 instances
•red underline= people identified anecdotally by the author
•5 instances
We can see that the volume starts and ends with more descriptive and autobiographical notes. This is followed by an influx of more close contacts referenced without prefixes, then the densest amount of people with prefixes towards the middle, followed again by closer contacts towards the end again. The majority of group identifiers are located at the front half of the volume.
Below is an example of how I separated the material into the preceding and following 15 words around the identified persons in Volume 17 in order to track significant trends that will help us identify relationship types between the author and the people that emerge in the text.
Working with this material, I looked at term frequency and collocating, or words that are habitually juxtaposed with another in frequency.
Visualization 2:
Word Tree for Highest Count Associative Words for Identifiers With and Without Prefixes
Takeaways:
•There appears to be a trend of more formal events such as tea, dine and dined with people identified with prefixes as opposed to those without, who are more associated with informal times like lunch.
•There is more verb usage with people the author identifies without prefixes, such as went.
•I assume that the trend in the word trees for mr and mrs to be associated with and is because they are generally being mentioned in relation with other people.
•mr is still the number one count in the identifications without prefixes due to coming up in the preceding and following 15 words. I can possibly follow this study up with a smaller string of context material to refine this research.
•Besides on the boat (3 instances) I wasn't able to identify many common strings of words or phrases that were common preceding or following the identification of people.
•We spoke in our last meeting about being able to distinguish between people that the author is meeting with in person and people the author is referencing anecdotally or secondhand. I was only able to identify a handful of instances when these secondhand references occurred. One possible flag to identify these interactions is to search for words like telegram and call, highlighted here, as well as words like wrote and letter.
1913 Theoretical Research
Mary Newberry was a family relative of Theodore Davis, Emma B. Andrews' partner, and kept two correspondences during her travels from 1912 to 1913 as they traveled on the Nile. A Winter on the Nile was written for her friend Adeline in Indianapolis while Some Further Accounts of the Nile was addressed to the author's son.
While both collections take place over the same time period and noted as being transcribed by family members, there are significant differences in punctuation and spelling styles indicating that the work was done by two different parties. There are also complications in Some Further Accounts around the spacing of the text and the original digitization of the material that necessitated transcribing the material rather than relying on optical character recognition. Given that A Winter on the Nile and Some Further Accounts both span two years and are fairly in-depth, I was instructed to extract a significant section to examine alongside the EBA diary material.Identifying relevant material across these two collections and the 19th volume of the Emma B. Andrew's Diary was difficult. While the text is very rich in the two Mary Newberry collections, there are often overlapping accounts across individual days that reveal different sides to a single story, accounts from Emma B. Andrews' final volume are very minimal. This would be her final diary collection and descriptions are often reduced down to a list of proper names, locations and weather conditions without much social context. With a free rein to focus on any time span between 1912 through 1913 in the collections, I became interested with an incident on the 14th of February, 1913.
Morgan on his way to Beni Hasan, ca. 1912
Department of Egyptian Art
By the end of 1912, J.P. Morgan was under scrutiny by the Pujo Committee investigating an alleged money trust that Morgan was involved in. Citing health troubles which managed to cause a tremor in the stock market, Morgan returned to Egypt to recover, check in on his art collection and connect with family and associates like Theodore Davis and Emma B. Andrews. Andrews is casual enough with the famously intimidating power broker to refer to the man simply as 'J.P'. Mary Newberry, chronically unimpressed by the self-important figures that would cross her path throughout the course of A Winter on the Nile, identifies Morgan witheringly as the "Great Man.
From our present vantage point, it's difficult to ascertain what was medically happening with J.P. Morgan during this period. Throughout his adult life, he required an annual three month of vacation into his contracts to cure a variety of now unrecognized nineteenth century ailments that were prone to attack only the idle rich. Mary Newberry herself described an affliction of neuralgia, a sensitivity of the nerves that caused her to be bed ridden for many weeks of the trip and seek electrotherapy in Luxor, Egypt, but is no longer recognized as a condition in modern medicine. Newspapers at the time widely reported Morgan's health problems simply as "indigestion," which gives the impression that he may have been fabricating conditions to evade the Pujo Committee. A retrospective by the MET speculates that this indigestion may have, in fact, been a series of strokes. As someone inclined to smoke a minimum of 12 cigars a day, opulent meals and averse to any form of exercise, this is certainly a possibility.
Khargeh, Morgan's private Nile boat, ca. 1912
Department of Egyptian Art
Regardless, both Mary Newberry collections report J.P. Morgan arrived in February. 8th and staying in one of his homes he called "The American House" across the Nile from the city of Luxor. On the February 15th, Mary wrote in the A Winter on the Nile collection,
"Mr. Morgan's eccentric behavior has caused a buzz of comment and conjecture. During the two or three days his dahabya {sic} lay here the people at the American House spent their time in moving into tents and back again according to messages from the Great Man as to whether he was or was not going out there to occupy. He finally did not go. He had a party often on his boat whom he had invited to go to Khartoum and somehow it leaked out that their lives were a burden to them because their host was so cross and tyrannical."
And in the Some Further Thoughts collection:
"Mr. J.P. Morgan is also tied up over there on his boat, and rumor has it that the Great Man is as cross as two sticks... and making the lives of his guests a burden to them."
Unfortunately, Emma B. Andrews makes no mention of either Morgan's arrival, the incident in question or Morgan's death a month and a half later in Rome. Newberry only provides a single sentence in remembrance after recording her cousin's trip to the dentist.
"Cousin Theodore had such a dreadful tooth this morning that I took him to the dentist's and had it out. He suffered so horribly a year ago because he didn't have a tooth out, that we didn't delay it on this occasion for fear he would change his mind. The news of Mr. J. P. Morgan's death came this morning.
Cairo is bursting into bloom as befits the time of year. The flowering trees are something ecstatic..."
I feel that this event might be interesting to examine not only as a biographical footnote for J.P. Morgan but also as a reflection of how female writers and thinkers like Mary Newberry assessed the Great Men of the Gilded Age in their own time. The subsequent coding of these documents with historical markup language can be read about here.
References:
1 News Article, Tacoma Daily News (Published as THE TACOMA DAILY NEWS), February 27, 1913, P2. Accessed 9 July 2021.
2 News Article, Tacoma Daily News (Published as THE TACOMA DAILY NEWS), February 17, 1913, P5. Accessed 9 July 2021.
3 Morris, Edward. J. Pierpont Morgan: 1837–1913. 2021, p. 14.
4 The Graveyard of Old Diseases | CSI: Dixie. https://csidixie.org/numbers/mortality-census/graveyard-old-diseases. Accessed 8 July 2021.
5 News Article, Seattle Daily Times (Published as THE SEATTLE DAILY TIMES), February 17, 1913, P11. Accessed 9 July 2021
6 Strouse, Jean. “J. Pierpont Morgan: Financier and Collector.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 57, no. 3, 2000, p. 1. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/3258853.
7 News Article, Star and Herald (Published as Star and Herald.), March 2, 1913, P3. Accessed 9 July 2021.