This is a text analysis project which utilizes oral histories from the University of Kentucky Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.
The specific collection referenced here is titled "Appalachia: Women of Coal," which contains original audio files of interviews which were recorded between 1992-1994. In 1996, Women of Coal was published by Randall Norris and Jean-Philippe Cyprus.
In 1996, Randall Norris and Jean-Phillipe Cypres published Women of Coal, utilizing oral history interviews of fifty-five Appalachian women from Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Women of Coal, while a fairly groundbreaking work in the field of Appalachian women’s history, does not present an academic argument from its breadth of interviews– and indeed, this was not the goal. By analyzing the original audio recordings when available and the edited stories of the women whose original interviews are not archived, this project seeks to explore the broader historical context of these women’s stories. By applying computational methods such as topic modeling and word vector analysis as well as painting a broader historical picture for the original interviews one can not only better understand the primary sources represented in Women of Coal but also the ways overarching American society has viewed and impacted regions such as Appalachia. Through digital textual analysis of these interviews and consideration of the historical context of the region, women’s intimate labor in the coalfields becomes apparent. __