Data

First, I searched the term “shellshock” across periodicals, newspapers, journals, and serials between the years 1914-1932 across the HathiTrust collection. I then isolated results from England and America, and then isolated results by language to restrict the parameters to English. Then, I isolated medical journals from this search, creating a separate collection, so I could compare medical journals with mass media like newspapers, serials, and journals. Thus, I created two separate worksets for periodicals alone.

While keyword searching can be less effective on its own, as Jeffrey Beal argues, I used HathiTrust’s advanced search system to isolate newspapers, journals, and serials which dealt with shellshock. I then sorted out all journals which were medical in purpose, and created two collections, one for newspapers which were not medical journals, offering me a collection of 192 volumes, and a second collection of 101, restricted to solely medical journals. Once I validated these collections, isolating out volumes which were not open access, I was left with 100 volumes in the medical journal list, and 189 volumes in the general newspaper list. Given that HathTrust encompasses 18 million volumes and counting, this may seem a paltry number, but remembering that I am filtering for newspapers, specifically newspapers with a “full view” option, this number is restricted as a part of my efforts to implement quality controls for my research.

I created a workset of war poems, including work by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Rupert Burke, along with lesser known war poets such as Moses Weldon Sowards and Elizabeth Hall, which were all available to view. In addition, I created a workset of novels by Mary Borden, namely The Romantic Woman (1920) The Tortoise (1921), Jane: Our Stranger (1924), Three Pilgrims and A Tinker (1928), Journey Down A Blind Alley (1946) Margin of Error (1954), and The Hungry Leopard (1956), so that I could compare poetry with prose.

In all, I downloaded 4 corpora using the keyword search, which I then sorted using the research collection tool into medical journals which mentioned shellshock, newspapers mentioning shellshock, novels by Mary Borden, and war poetry. I then downloaded each corpus through the workset builder supplied by HathiTrust, validated every workset to make sure that the full-text versions would be available for research, and began using the InPho Topic Explorer, which is just one of the analytic tools which HathiTrust provides, along with documentation for its use.