Author: marycooperwahlen

Mary is a second-generation L.A. native who grew up in Southern California. She is a non-traditional student who returned to college after thirty years to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and a minor in Digital Humanities at UCLA. Her return to college was motivated by her interest in studying why individuals do or do not prepare for natural disasters associated with their geographic regions. This interest stems from living near UCLA during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and the destruction of her home in New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a proud member of Tau Sigma – a national honor society for university transfer students.

13Dec 2019 by marycooperwahlen

The Heart of the Matter: Land in Early America

Perspectives

“Stories of origin are always instrumental in creating and reinventing the narrative of national identity. Frontier stories occupy a significant place in American imagination.” Johannes Ledolter and Lea Vandervelde Introduction: In the chaotic times of post-Revolutionary War America, squatters such as “Prisoner Ross” were eager to stake a claim and begin their lives in early America (John Armstrong to Josiah Harmar April 12th, 1785). One of the problems with squatters like Ross was that they were illegally attempting to establish settlements on inhabited Indigenous lands. This created inter-ethnic friction which often led to violence and disrupted the Native lifeways on their ancestral homelands. During this period, America was working to form its identity while actively attempting to maintain a cohesive union. It was clear to the early government that these…

11Dec 2019 by marycooperwahlen No Comments

Topic Modeling Reflection

Uncategorized

I initially ran the topic model based on 100 topics neglecting to incorporate that we were only dealing with approximately one-third of the content of these complete records. At that point, I had not calculated the total number of documents (or lines) we would be analyzing if access was readily available to the whole corpus; I assumed it would be large nonetheless. One hundred topics did not provide any clear distinction that was insightful. I then reduced that number by half with still about the same results. I reduced the topic number again in half (so 25% of the first number of topics). I then reduced the number down in increments of 5 reaching 20 and then 15. Twenty seems to display enough distinction although again, all topics have a…