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A simple setup in Viewshare allowed us to view the sermons by location and by date. What Viewshare demonstrates, in this case, is the contours of the corpus. At a glance, users can see where and when these works were presented. This kind of view can help researchers see places, times, or features that might yield interesting results, either because they are outliers or because they repeat in ways that may have meaning.
In The Martyred President Sermons, the sermons come in waves, clustered around Lincoln’s assassination (the first Sunday after his death which was Easter Sunday, the Wednesday after that, and the following Sunday) and then again for the National Day of Mourning on June 1.
The sermons are overwhelmingly from the northeast. The one sermon from Illinois is on the occasion of Lincoln’s burial there. The one from Charleston, South Carolina, was given by a minister from the north.
In addition to a presenting the location of these sermons, we decided to highlight their date of delivery, color-coding their pins by date. The sermons given in the weeks after the assassination seem to be further from the major cities of the east coast; however, this is a claim not about Lincoln eulogy sermons, but about this particular corpus.
Viewshare allows users to explore a various contents through different forms of display. While it is mainly a tool for presenting collections, it can help researchers frame their corpus for audiences and themselves, as you can see you in our Voyant discussion.