The following is my work for History 698: Programming for Historians, a course in programming and the work of digital historians.
The Project
My dissertation research focuses on James Maury and his immediate family. Maury was the first American consul in Liverpool, serving from 1790 until 1829. He arrived in Liverpool in the early 1780s to maintain the British end of an import-export business with his brother Fontaine, who remained in Virginia in Fredericksburg. The Maurys exported tobacco for many Virginians, including James Madison and James Monroe. James Maury went to England with his bride Catherine Armitage, but she died in 1794. In 1796, he married Margaret Rutson, whose brother William lived or worked in Liverpool. James and Margaret had five children, all of whom moved to the United States as adults and who, to the best of my knowledge, considered themselves Americans. Throughout his life in England, James Maury balanced the needs of his life, family, and position in Liverpool with those of family and business in Virginia.
I built a MySQL database to track the correspondence between the various Maurys, their friends and business associates. I have also made preliminary maps of James Maury's correspondents in Virginia and England based on the correspondence I have collected so far.
When I have been able to collect and transcribe more letters, I would like to topic model the letters between James Maury and his brothers. From what I have been able to determine, each of the brothers related to James in different ways. Matthew, the eldest, writes very long letters which are full of family matters and seem a bit bossy. Fontaine, James' business partner, frequently got into debt in the 1780s and 90s and may have actually gone to jail for a brief time. Benjamin, seventeen years younger than James, writer rarely and from a different place each time. I am curious whether text mining and topic modeling bear out my suspicions about the different tones and purposes of the kind of letter each brother writes.