The group focused on searching out aides for creating and curating our project’s dataset. My part in this task was two-fold. One was to seek out a “corpus” of sound words which would help flesh out our keyword searches in the American Civil War: Letters and Diaries database. So far, no luck finding previously established bodies of words. This led us to trying to find tools to help us build a sound corpus for our use and the use of other possible projects in the future. What I found were online dictionaries and thesauruses as well as searching through the sources themselves to look for the words that people in the 19th century used. My second task was to learn how to leverage the database to get us the most precise results possible and cut down on the work we need to do to generate our dataset.
-David Campmier