Newspapers, Serials, and Journals (Non-Medical)
This 500 iteration-based topic model reflects 189 volumes of newspapers, journals, and serials, which appear in the HathiTrust collection while querying the keyword “shellshock.”
Turning on k-20 filtering, this model of topics reveal a dark green cluster, an outlier with significant focus on “labor,” “cost,” “production,” and “industry.”
One cluster reveals words related to the First World War, such as “peace,” “army,” “foreign,” and “military.”
As Anessa Stagner notes, after the First World War, the figures of shellshocked soldiers became a shorthand for the temporary state which Americans perceived the war to be, and thus, easily curable. Shellshocked veterans were often referenced across both medical and newspaper accounts as a symbol for the government’s failure to take care of its subjects, which took on new meaning during the Great Depression, hence why some of these results may reference labor alongside the end of the First World War.
One unanticipated result stemmed from the fact that there were a number of newspapers intended for farmers. Thus, one cluster only references terms which refer to beekeeping practices, such as "hive" and "swarm."