It seems talking about the weather when there’s nothing else to discuss isn’t new.
I love Voyant. Literally everything about it is perfect – there’s no other way to describe my feelings. I’ve always found that for me, trends are fun to observe (it’s one of the reasons I took AP Statistics my senior year in highschool, not that I was really any good at it but because it was fun). Voyant is similar except for the fact that it does all the hard stuff for you, compiling the information and putting it into an easily digestable format!
For this, I took the text from 1828 to 1832 and uploaded it to Voyant. From there, I omitted stop words that aren’t normally included but we can leave out since we know that this is a diary (I don’t really care that 1828, October, and Friday make the list since it’s to be expected). From there, we can see the top unique words used in that section!
We’ve made mention of how much Pearson seems to use the word ‘weather,’ but it’s starting to make sense. In this period, it’s most frequently seen in 1828, which is when he didn’t have much occurring in his life. Given his commitment to his writing, it was perhaps the most he had to write about on a given day. However, as he began college at Union, we can see that the use of this word begins to trail, until it almost isn’t mentioned at all in 1832.
