Sentiment Analysis of William Cranch's Petitions for Freedom Court Reports Using Python and VADER.

Authors

Anna Krause, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

4-2020

Document Type

Other

Citation

* Title: CranchSentimentAnalysis
* Author: Krause, A
* Date: 2020
* Code version: 2.0
* Availability: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/

Comments

(c) 2020 Anna Krause

for 2019-2020 UCARE

produced through Jupyter Notebooks

Text from: http://earlywashingtondc.org/

Abstract

Text analysis from William Cranch's court reports on the 19th Century African American Petitions for Freedom. Cranch provided selected court reports and their full title, date, and document text was imported to a csv file. This data was then analyzed using Python and its multiple software libraries to clean and prepare the text. The VADER(Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) package was utilized to give a sentiment score to each body of text, then was compared and visualized with the entire corpus. Results showed that most court reports carried a high rate of positive sentiment.