The graph above is the culmination of the work that Tong, Iris, and I have done on Linn’s Journals. The red boxes represent a war. The first war was on Feb 7-8 and the Union won, you can see the amount of positive things that Linn wrote spiked on the first day of the battle, which was then followed up with a lot of negative thoughts on the second day of battle. In the time after the battle, there are three days in which there are more negative than positive sentiments. During the down time between the battles, there is not much neutral analysis done by Linn. In the few days before the next battle, there is a spike in negative sentiment, but there is no journals written on the actual battle date of May 14th. After the second battle, there is a spike in neutral analysis, which I take to mean that he is “battle hardened” and is analyzing his situation with less emotion and more factual analysis. In the down time between the second and third battle there is a spike in positive writing from Linn and in the days before there is a boost in both positive and negative emotions which is understandable because there is a battle that he should be getting excited for, but he has seen many people sick and dying and knows that he can be next.
This is a photo from the Journal.xml file that we marked up. In this screenshot, Linn talks about the how someone is hungover from heavy drinking the night before. He also discusses the hardships that he and the battalion are facing. This is a mainly negative excerpt and is a good example of the types of things that we were looking for regarding negative things written by Linn. I worked on marking up the middle section of Linn’s Journal, which contained time after the second battle, which was an interesting time in his journal to analyze. As you can see from the graph, there were many changes in sentiment around this time.
