Introduction to Section II of the Pearson Diaries

By Sam De Spuches

The Summer IDEaS project gave me a glimpse into the work of creating digital editions of texts, which perhaps have more to offer than a traditional physical book. It caused me to explore many different ways of studying a text and think of what an editor can contribute to the reader’s experience. It’s exciting to contribute to an ever growing digital library and to give it my own touch.

Since the text will be on a Manifold website, we are able to add annotations and resources that can make the readers' experience more involved and informed of the historical context. I decided to do annotations on the text that delve deeper into the issues than they would if this were a paperback edition of the diary; the simple reason is that on the website we have unlimited space to provide information. My main two focuses were capital punishment and depression as they related to Pearson’s life.

There were a few subjects in Pearson’s diary that intrigued me, like capital punishment and depression. I became curious about how these issues were looked at during his life. My findings were surprising: I found that the philosophy behind capital punishment was more advanced than expected, and that of depression was less advanced than I thought. People in the North-East were already calling for the abolition of capital punishment. At the same time, depression wasn’t even remotely considered an illness, unless it was a part of a broader condition of being called crazy.

The most intriguing part on the technological side of the project was all the text analysis tools we were introduced to. Voyant, a browser-based tool for text analysis, allowed me to search keywords in the text to find instances where Pearson discussed a subject I was interested in. This came in handy when I was researching his views on capital punishment and depression. It also sparked my curiosity to search other subjects: I found he was more modern than I would have thought on sexuality, while also confirming his racially discriminatory beliefs. He considered homosexual relationships to be as legitimate and moral as heterosexual ones, using the Bible to draw this conclusion. This really surprised me, since most modern Christian entities don’t have the same position. At the same time, he considered First Nations people to be inferior, labelling them as a useless part of society. Another feature showed the most used words in the whole text or only in a section of it, which is interesting to find what he was talking about the most on a general level.

Another browser-based tool for text analysis that I used is Lexos, a software that parses through the entire text, and categorizes each word based on given dictionaries. For example if I tell it that words like “happy” and “content” count for “happiness words”, and “mad” and “livid” count as “anger words”, it can tell me how much of each category is in the text. Before this project, I never even thought this could be used to analyse a large text. I used this tool to contrast his happiness words and his sadness words, and got an idea of his emotional trend throughout his lifetime by feeding the data into Tableau, a graphing software. Getting comfortable using this tool is something I’m happy to have learned, since it gives a lot of freedom to visualize any type of data, without being too complicated to use. As an Economics major, this could turn out to be useful for future projects.

In conclusion, I discovered a whole new way of approaching research that I don’t think I would have ever been exposed to if not for this project. I stepped into the life of a man that lived two-hundred years ago and tried to understand him. This proved to be challenging, since it’s so clear that our values and viewpoints are completely different, but I also found that he struggled with the same things that I and my peers struggle with. At the deepest level, things haven’t changed that much in all this time, which is a lesson I will take with me.