Most Used Terms and Phrases in FSU's History
On this page, I decided to take a proper look at every edition of Framingham States Gatepost issues between 1932 and 1951, with only a question in mind. "What were some of the most popular terms used within the Gatepost?" Now of course I didn't take a look at every single PDF, but I used Gale Scholar Labs to skim through phrases and terms that students of FSU would associate or otherwise use within their day-to-day back then.
Most Used Term Ngram
The first choice was the use of the N-Grams for the simple one word majority use, but I ran into a small problem there. That being the fact that Framingham, and the word Miss, used in this case to address the many students then, were the largest words used, which I felt was too broad of a word, in association with FSU to be included, so I dropped them, and this was my result.
As shown, most of the talk regarding the gatepost is concerning certain points of the average students life within FSU. Funny enough, seeing the name Mary on there as one of the largest words made me wonder just how many students within this time period had the name. I understand that Mary was a common name, but my mind just kept on repeating "It couldn't be THAT many students, right?"
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How many times Mary is seen
I am simultaneously suprised and disappointed as the number is both higher and lower than what I expected.
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Named Entity Locations
As explained, the category most shown was Geo-Political Entity's. With how often cities are mentioned, it shows in the care that the students had for their college.
After using Ngrams, the next big section I went with was the Named Entity Recognition tool. Considering it tracks how often a character is used, it felt like a no-brainer to gather information of known entities associated with FSU. Within the showings of the tool, I had mainly found the naming of cities and towns throughout the United States. I can't say I was suprised as throughout each year, there was often mention of different cities either being highlighted, maybe with a student or professor taking interest in that location, or because some organization within that city helping FSU and its students
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One final section that I decided to use, and slightly going back to the field of Ngrams, was the Term Frequency tool designed to show how often a selected word would be shown within the documents presented by the user behind the research.
Similar to the Ngrams above most of what is given are mentions of the school, or classes. More often then not, people were speaking of what types of plays, or outings were occuring during that month or year. Mentions of members winning awards or raffles is also apparent, while also being pointed out for community service or excellent grades/work.
Ngram Term Frequency most used words
From the top, up until about the term student. Most of the words shown have some link to the separate clubs or classes taking part in some form of event that shows up within either the front page, or as an addedum to another event happening sooner or later.
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To say that the work shown was substantial would be appropriate, though luckily for me, technology has done the hard part for me.
Most often what I would notice with the terms shown is the generalization of the location of Framingham. Even in my attempts to try and view things from a much broader perspective, as to what may be the bigger subject within FSU, it would almost always generalize to the university as a whole. Not to say this is something bad, just merely a bit rough to deal with when wanting to see what clubs or activities may be happening.
For example, within the Ngram, some of the larger words shown, like "class" generalized into either speaking about this years freshman or senior class, or to a class everyone may be attending. Whereas a smaller word within the gram like "column" tended to speak on multiple levels, speaking about Gatepost itself, or simply to the term being used to refer students to a section of that issue.
Given how much time was given for the project, and what was shown within the articles, I haven't been able to process every bit of information throughout the set of articles. Not to say that nothing was there, but this was more of a "scratching of the surface" type information gathering for the omeka page as a whole. If any future students want to add any research of their own to this article, please don't hesistate to ask.