Editors Choice: Text Analysis of the Grand Jury Documents

I watched Twitter and the CBC while the prosecutor was reading his statement. I watched the live feeds from Ferguson, and other cities around the US. Back in August, when this all first began, I was glued to my computer, several feeds going at once.

A spectator.

Yesterday, Mitch Fraas put the grand jury documents (transcripts of the statements, the proceedings) into Voyant Tools:

For those looking for better way of searching the million+ word grand jury transcripts. I’ve put the text in Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=1416958122329.9345&stopList=1416958515132tx …

These ultimately came from here: http://apps.stlpublicradio.org/ferguson-project/evidence.html

So today, I began, in a small way, to try to make sense of it all, the only way that I can. Text analysis.

None of this counts as analysis. But – by putting it altogether, my hope is that more people will grab the text files, grab the R script, explore the Voyant corpus, and really put this all under the microscope. I was tremendously effected by Bethany’s latest blog post, ‘All at once‘, which discusses her own reaction to recent news in both Ferguson and UVa, and elsewhere. It was this bit at the end that really resonated:

[…]we need analytical and interpretive platforms, too, that help us embrace our own subjective positioning in the systems in which we labor–which means, inevitably, to embrace our own complicity and culpability in them. And we need these, at the same time, to help us see beyond: to see patterns and trends, to read close and distantly all at once, to know how to act and what to do next. We need platforms that help us understand the workings of the cogs, of which we are one.

So here’s my small contribution. Maybe this can be a platform for someone to do a deeper analysis, to get started with text analysis, to read distantly and closely, to see beyond, and to understand what happened during the Grand Jury.

Source: Text Analysis of the Grand Jury Documents

This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: