My dissertation project is documenting and contrasting the war-time experience of different ship types of the US Navy in World War II. For instance, a destroyer had the potential to perform many different types of mission from surface combat, to concoy escort, anti-submarine patrol, and screening of larger formations where an fleet type aircraft carrier only perfromed strategic and tactical strike missions as part of a large fleet organization. How did these different mission types impact the experience of the crews and the relationship between these crews. Another aspect is the vessel crew and airwing crew on an aircraft carrier. The air wing was routinely rotated to training or stateside assignments while the vessel's crew stayed on station in the active war theater. How did this differetn wartime experience impact their relationship?
Each issue and indidivdual articel within that issue is proceeded by the number of the month of that issue.
7_0_July_1925 is the complete July 1925 issue.
Each individual article is denoted by the month and the section and numerical order of that article within the issue and then with a textual term that illustrates the article's content.
7_1.0_Battlefleet is the July 1925 issue (7), the first article in the table of contents (1.0), and the word Battlefleet as short hand for the title "A Balanced Fleet for the United States". Other issues have examples such as:
11_1.7_Treaty-Design which is the November issue (11), seventh article in the table of contents (1.7), and an article titled "Post Treaty Naval Design".
Since the Professional Notes section is prominent in each issue it is simply denoted with number of the month and the title "Professional Notes" (7_Professional Notes for the July issue).
Many of the sources for my main project do not lend themselves to the aims of this class. I have, however, found a source that discusses the fleet organization and the nascent concept of the use of aircaraft in naval operations in the inter-war years. As a single issue, this makes this corpus a little hard to navigate so I plan to locate each article and break it out of the main txt file to create a file for each individual piece.
3 Feb - Added superficially cleaned versions of indidivdual articles from the July 1925 publication. Also added a spreadsheet of these articles. I have not found a piece of information that I see can be organized into a table for publication either in Excel or plain text.
15 Feb - Some minor cleaning changes uoloaded. Significant work remains on the table and Professional Notes section but I have re-loaded these to the repository as I work with a copy of them off-line.
6 Apr - Previous to this I have worked my way through the exercises frequently with not much success. I did not see the value in Topic Modeling and website construction has been maddeningly frustrating. I have re-worked how I approached my data by separating each issue from July to December 1925 into its own entry. I have then delved each issue for particular articles that are relevant to how naval power transitioned from battleships to aircraft carriers. While this transition did not happen until 1942, looking at how nations percieved naval strnegth in the inter-war period gives clues on how naval power developed in this new way.
Showing my age and my less than enthusiastic affinity to new, electronic methods I struggle with plain text editing and do not grasp why I would use it. The source I have chosen for this project is relatively clean already and I can understand it just fine as is. Cleaning with Sublime is a laborious process for me but I am starting to see some small success. The largest area for a little clean up was the page breaks denoted by a long string of #'s which I have reduced to just one and the page number itself. Other than that I do not see much more cleaning needing to be done.
I just don't get how to do this. I admit that I have not spent a great deal of time on this but I find I can do things manually faster than I can figure out how to do them "computationally". Everything about this process screams more work.
10 Feb - I choose two charts from the Professional Notes article. I had intended to compare the values of the two charts against each other showing the varioaus ranges where American and brirish forces could engage in 1925. RAW Graphs did not work for me. Google Studio was too confusing. I did not want to download new software but I added Tableau. Saw some success but kept getting errors to save projects in the public space. Took screenshot of one chart I managed to create. 15 Feb - RAW Graphs working now. Playing around with visualizations. 17 Feb - Finally played with tableau enought o gain a view that I liked. Not perfect but as close as I have come yet.
It took some time to get a website working and I am loathe to make too many changes with what I have and go backwards. I would love to change the theme into something more aesthetically pleasing but have not found the right method yet. I believe I know what to do but I have not tried it yet becasue I am unsure if I can recover a working website if (when) it fails. All of the minor tweaks that I have accomplished usually come with several failed attempts and frantic efforts to get back to a semi-working state.
As it pertains to my initial dissertation project, this data provides more of a deep background context to my discussion of the social interaction and attitudes between warship crews of different warships classes during combat operation sof WWII. This data can be more useful to someone studying fleet organization and construction discussions during the inter-war period. The mighty US Navy battle fleet that brought Japan to her knees was predominantly designed and authorized in 1940. Warship design and construction authorized and begun during the war was largely canceled prior to being launched. Some ideas for future use/potential of this data are:
Tracking the authors of pieces in the main section of each issue Proceedings is the professional journal of the US Navy and all of the individual articles are written by serving members of the Navy or civilian agencies or personnel intimately tied to naval issues. Many of these authors would have served during WWII and it would be interesting to track who wrote what, where they ended up during the war, and analyzing how their professional opinions were born out by the war or changed because of the war.
Analyze the naval intelligence presented in the Professional Notes section Each issue has a Professional Notes section whcih reports on the efforts of foreign navies regarding naval operations and design/construction of their national fleets. Since we now know what each navy had at the time, a researcher could look at what was reported via the Professional Notes section and compare this with the reality we now know. This is an important element when discussing fleet design elements in the inter-war period and operational decision during war. One can only prepare for the threat that is known. Whether you have adequately estimated the threat plays a large role in the decision ont he battlefield. Analyzing this information may shed morellight one why some decisions were made before the war as the warship design and why some decisions were made during the war as to where and when to commit available forces.
These two are the most important potential uses of this data so far. I have done a poor job of fully considering how this data can be parsed via computational methods so I am sure there are other elements to consider which I have yet to discover.