A short week for me, as I was on leave until 22, but thanks to the machine generated transcripts sent by Felix, I could start working on the textile folk songs dataset experimenting with the text analysis tool presented in the digital drop in session.

Felix generated a .txt, .pdf and .doc version of the Folk Songs and Ballads of Lancashire, using AbbyfineReader. Jennifer was available to review the generated transcript to check the dialectal terms and colloquialisms, but we are still framing the collaboration so, in the meantime, I decided to do a first round of analysis using AntConc.

The word frequency function allowed me to start identifying words that could reflect the categories discussed with Daniel last week, but also to generate new ones. In particular, I was impressed by the appearance of words related to animals (rabbit, dog, guinea pigs, horse, cock, birds, goose), economy (poor, cheap, money, halfpenny, tuppence, wage), products (especially food related terms like ale, cheese, cakes, cream, sugar, bacon, toast crumbs). Interestingly, the objects category does not include industry related objects only (such as loom), but several everyday objects (like pot, mug, bed, plate, ring, knife) that suggest connections with social history collections. Very rich are also the Locations (Lancashire, Manchester, England, Oldham, Saddleworth, Laycock, Liverpool, London, Stockport, York) and Sites categories (Mill, town, church, home, bridge, street, garden, shop, canal, farm, market), showing the potential to connect with place-based datasets. I also added Work processes to include words like weaving and spinning, which can have strong connections with museum collections fields. I feel that there is potential to analyse body/sensorial terms (Heart, face, hair, hand, eyes, feet, knees), as well as to explore family/gender issues starting from the number of terms (often dialectal) related to family relationship.

I started discussing these results with Daniel on Friday and I created an Excel spreadsheet where we can compare them with his analysis on the Coal Mining anthology. We also decided that this could be another fascinating task to share with Jennifer, to capture her perspective and knowledge on Lancashire dialects and working classes history.

I also had a follow-up meeting with Celia Richardson from the Legal Team and Carol for the agreement with the University of Leicester. I previosly collected and sent to her the consent forms developed for both Mines of Memory and Textile Tales projects, and she is now able to draft the agreement including both the data sharing and the collaboration with Stef De Sabbata. She will be on leave the next week, so we will likely to have the next meeting after the 6th March.