We know this is a little late, but we didn’t have much to update anyone on before late last week. We were initially interested in Carleton’s investment portfolio and analyzing how it has changed, especially within the first 50 years, but we were unable to obtain the necessary data to do so. We started by contacting one of Carleton’s archivists to view the treasurer’s notes from the first 50 years. The notes existed and were accessible, but we were unable to glean much interesting information about Carleton’s investments. In some cases we could not read the treasurer’s handwriting, and otherwise the most interesting information to be found on what Carleton spent its money on was what furniture was purchased. There was no information on investments other than what Carleton put into various plots of land around Northfield. We wanted and needed more to be able to create an interesting analysis, so we contacted Carleton’s investment office located in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, after a long wait we were informed that all the data they have on holdings and asset allocations pre-1990’s is very limited, so they were unable to give us anything before 1916. In a last ditch effort we decided to turn to the minutes from the board of trustees meetings throughout the first 50 years of Carleton’s existence, hoping we could use some text analysis tools to find any insight into where Carleton’s money was going. Unfortunately, we were unable to find much information, and once again were unable to gain a good insight into the early years of Carleton’s investment history.

However, although we couldn’t manage to get investment information from the trustees’ minutes, we were able to find some other interesting trends using various text analysis tools. To do so we used Voyant, an online suite of analysis and exploration tools for digital texts. We obtained the minutes from the Carleton archives in a word document and imported it into Voyant. Using the word cloud generator and selecting the “English (Taporware)” option in the stop words list function (to eliminate words such as “the”, and “of”, etc. from the word cloud), we were able to get an idea of what words appeared most frequently within the text. We then used the word trends tool to graph the usage of those words and others throughout the minutes. The word trends tool even allows you to combine the graphs generated from searching different words to compare their respective trends side by side. We used this to look up and compare the trends of various related words to find what narratives might have been present within the text. If we found certain trends we would then search for the words in the text to find the contexts in which each word was mentioned to examine whether or not a narrative actually existed. Fortunately, using these tools we were able to find some interesting trends and possible narratives present in the first 50 years of Carleton’s existence. For our final product, instead of our original plan of creating an interactive graph that would allow users to explore how much Carleton invested in different companies throughout the years, we created a website that guides people through the trends and stories that we found in the minutes. Check it out, it looks pretty cool!