About This Project
This started as a project for HIST 623: Digital History Seminar with Professor Douglas Seefeldt at Ball State University in the Fall of 2013. The decision to revise this project came later, both from the desire to make this a larger and more encompassing project, and because my research on the topic pushed me to realize there was much more that I could do.
Throughout my research I have used many primary and secondary sources, both directly in this project, and as a means to make my knowledge base larger and stronger. The following pages: Sources & Historiography, and Tools will give you all of the sources that I have used in this project, as well as related works that can and will aid in any research you wish to do. The Tools page will also give a list of the tools that I have used and found greatly useful throughout the process of creating this project.
My interest in Camp Morton grew not from my own curiosity, but from the questions I was asked. Individuals, especially professors began to ask me questions as I started to research Camp Morton, and as time went on I realized that the answers they wanted did not lie in research done specifically on the camp, but that they would come from understanding why the camp had been forgotten. With this in mind I began to look into Memory Theory studies, as well as studies on public memory, monuments, and individual memory. With this increased volume of research patterns and trends began to come to light that showed how Camp Morton has been forgotten over time, and many of the contributing factors.
The process of this digital project did not start by looking at Camp Morton, but instead explores the sources that can be used to understand why Camp Morton has been forgotten. I started this project by collecting primary sources from Camp Morton that came in a variety of formats. These included newspaper articles, diaries, and correspondence. I ran all of these sources through different text analysis tools, namely Google Ngram and Voyant. Using these tools allowed me to isolate words in different ways. I could tell how many times specific words were used in comparison to other words in one or more sources. I could also look at the context of that word -- was it used with positive or negative connotations, or was it merely used. With all of these findings in mind I turned to Civil War Memory, and History and Memory studies. I used these studies and sources to understand why I was seeing specific patterns in my primary sources. Using this wide variety of sources gave me the ability to see patterns across the board and better understand my results.
Please, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Thanks for visiting and taking the time to look through my work.
Sincerely,