Documentation

This site is a work in progress and may change both as we update the tools and as we update the underlying data to reflect the publication and editorial revision of additional letters through The Willa Cather Archive. The below notes are intended to help provide transparency surrounding our process.

Notes on Corpus

  • The 3,125 letters we used in creating these tools are not all fully available on The Willa Cather Archive. Most of these letters are available on the archive, however some are still in the publication pipeline as of 11/12/22.
  • While, like The Cather Archive, we use the term “letter” to describe the documents in our corpus, several of the documents are postcards and cards.
  • In viewing all of our tools and content, please keep in mind that we are working with the known Cather letters–we do not have access to all of the letters Cather likely wrote during her lifetime as some have been lost or destroyed.
  • It is worth remembering that The Cather Archive chose to only encode the first reference to a person, place, or work in a letter. When we talk about frequency, we mean the number of letters that mention a given person, place, or work. We do not mean the total number of times that person was mentioned, since The Cather Archive has not recorded that information.

Notes on Computation

  • We have used a combination of R and Python to process the XML files and collect data from the letters. All of our code is available through our GitHub repository.
  • For the network graphs, we chose to omit letters written to multiple recipients (e.g. a letter written to Mary Virginia Boak Cather and Charles F. Cather). We felt that in measuring social networks, it would be potentially misleading to count the connections in the letters for multiple recipients (since the references to specific people and works may have been targeted to one of the listed recipients, not all).

Notes on Future Improvements

  • We intend to update these tools in spring of 2023 to reflect new information provided by The Willa Cather Archive (primarily revised date information on a number of the published letters).