12Dec 2019 by ejung10 No Comments

Topic Modeling Reflection

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By Estelle Jung Topic Modeling Reflection             For my topic modeling assignment, 128 documents were used in total. The documents were from the two volumes of The Spanish Regime in Missouri by Louis Houck. At first, I tried to use 20 topics, but Mallet gave me the same weight of 0.25 for each topic. After changing the number of topics to 15, I ended up with various weights which is what we wanted. Thus, 15 seems to be the optimal number of topics for this example.             I think that there were two coherent topics apparent in this assignment based on the data from the Keys spreadsheet. Topic 13 had the highest weight of 0.69804. The top words of topic 13 included “order,” “made,” “time,” “great,” “make,” “part,” “lordship,” “men,”…
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11Dec 2019 by kaicolorado No Comments

Topic Modeling Reflection

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Kai Colorado I analyzed a corpus consisting of three sets of council transcriptions from meetings between Native American tribes, Europeans, and Euro-Americans. In Mallet, I generated fifteen (15) topics across the corpus of 292 documents. On the first iteration of the process, I attempted to generate ten (10) topics, but the weight each topic was the same. The majority of the 15 discernable topics were pertinent to the relations between parties or the organization of such. For example, the topic that I labeled “Boundaries” included the words “treaty, line, lands, boundary, river, etc.” The distinctions between indigenous topics and Eurocentric topics are also visible across the key terms. The category “European Officials” houses words such as, “general, commissioners, agent, government” and other words associated with Eurocentric standards of national organization.…
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11Dec 2019 by marycooperwahlen No Comments

Topic Modeling Reflection

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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…
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10Dec 2019 by anthonynesci No Comments

Topic Modeling Reflection

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Volumes 1 and 2 from the American State Papers were the primary source documets I used to run our topic modeling experiment. There were 4 different types of Topic Models I compared; 15, 20, 50, and 100 topics. For at least a few of the lines in each document I was able to make effective topics but as the topic model sizes got smaller, I found myself better identifying topics. The most popular topics came from the 15 topic model and the labels were Land Grants, Procedures, Community, Political Landscape, and the exchanging/passing down of land. It makes sense we are seeing these types of topics come up for our research in the American State Papers, but for the majority of bigger topic models I was not getting good enough…
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04Dec 2019 by kaicolorado
Power Dynamics Across Nations

Power Dynamics Across Nations

Perspectives, Uncategorized
            The process of successful negotiation is one that requires fluid communication and mutual understanding between parties. It is one that calls for give and take from all those involved. In the case of the negotiations between indigenous leaders, cross-cultural boundaries of language and negotiating standards hindered the fluidity of treatymaking and created misunderstanding between parties. Generally benefitting Europeans, these failures in communication created treaties and relationships that were perceived differently between the two groups. The skewed perceptions of these relationships built upon established disparities in power and societal constructs across cultures and further disadvantaged Native American tribes during the process of European immigration. Analyzing council transcripts of negotiations between Europeans and indigenous people sheds light on each party’s motives and perceptions of the other.             The council minutes I…
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