The most frequent racial language that appear in my collection is white (102) and colored (100). This language is to be expected because we won’t be seeing words like black or African American because they have not been deemed appropriate at this time yet. However the transition from colored to negro is apparent with negro being used 59 times and negroes being used 43.

I had a multitude of OCR errors among the results, so I attempted to scrub them all from the list and graphs when inputting stop words. The most frequent words in the corpus were expected being police, rioting, Detroit, June, and belle (excluding racial language). In respect to the event and less the location scrubbing words like Detriot allowed me to find the the most frequent words being

Police, rioting, riot, isle, and bridge.

In the black newspaper the 5 most distinctive words were learn, Monday, yelled, house and citizen.

In the white newspaper the 5 most distinctive words were, military, late, fear, burned, and bars.

Lastly for the final report the 5 most distinctive words were boys, time, percent, forest, and Lyons.

I was surprised in black newspapers learn was the most distinctive word, while in the white newspaper it was military. However, after looking into the content in the document it was an OCR error meaning the truly most used word in the black newspaper was Monday. Now floor has made it onto the list of most distinctive words as well.

From frequent words I am going to be looking into how police is used in context while for distinctive I will be looking into Monday. It was interesting to see how he weight the newspapers put on different events. Although the words all have the same meaning the white and black newspapers put more emphasis on Monday, the black newspaper more so than the white. But the final report did not, this makes sense because when getting news out to the audience for an event that just occurred Monday is an okay description but for the final report June 1943 is far more acceptable. In respect to racial language I noticed that the black newspaper used colored far more frequently than the negro and the white newspaper was the opposite. I can assume this either means that the white newspaper did not know the black community had a preference. Or thought of the change as nonsensical. Meanwhile the word white was used at a far greater frequency in the white newspaper than the black newspaper. This suggest that the white newspaper could be more worried about how it affected the white community. With that in mind combining the use of colored and negro the black newspaper also used it at a higher frequency in total than white. Which once again makes sense because we are even classifying the newspapers as white and black so they would want information my relevant to their respective audiences. Now when comparing this to the final report its relative frequency of racial language is almost identical leading me to believe this is a more non-bias source.  However, it also has the advantage of reporting on the riot far after it had occurred with greater accuracy.

I believe my text analysis does not fit the identity of the key features of my riot. Knowing the language used and what sources they were coming from and the context in which it is used has change my opinion. Initially it appeared to be a pogrom which is an attack on a group that is approved or condoned by the authorities which is completely incorrect. I blurred the lines between condoned and following orders which lead me to believe this. I believe a more accurate description would be an uprising. An uprising is a spontaneous upsurge of protest of violent expression of discontent, something with political content but short of a fill fledged revolutionary act. I am not completely satisfied with this title either because there is less a political nature to the Detroit riot, however there was clear social discontent and gave me the impression of a pot boiling over. Due to the discontent on both sides’ situations escalated quickly.

The 5 most frequent words in the corpus and their frequency across documents.

The 5 most distinctive words in the final report their frequency across documents.

The 5 most distinctive words in the black newspaper and their frequency across documents.

The 5 most distinctive words in the white newspaper and their frequency across documents.