Mapping the Movement: Text Analysis of The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Introduction

For my midterm project, I explored The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1804–1806), one of the earliest American travel records describing exploration, geography, and encounters with the natural world. I wanted to understand how the language of discovery captures both the physical journey and the mindset of the explorers. Using Voyant Tools, I visualized word patterns in the text to trace how the expedition’s environment shaped its narrative. I then compared these quantitative findings with the interpretive results of an AI tool to see how each approach reveals — and limits — different ways of reading historical writing.

Sources

The text was drawn from the Project Gutenberg public domain edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, covering the first leg of their westward expedition from St. Louis up the Missouri River. I uploaded the entire file into Voyant and created a custom stopword list that filtered out repetitive or logistical words such as it’s, verry, gave, small, great, large, and little. This step was essential to highlight meaningful content over technical description. I focused on the most frequently occurring environmental terms — river, camp, island, creek, and hill — to examine how their mentions changed across different sections of the journey.

Process

I first used the Cirrus tool to visualize word frequency, which revealed how the journals are dominated by concrete, physical vocabulary rather than emotional or abstract language. Words like river, camp, and men appear at the core, signaling a world structured by geography and labor.

Next, I used the Trends graph to trace how these keywords fluctuated across the text. The word river appears consistently, confirming its central role as both a literal route and a narrative backbone. Camp rises and falls in a rhythmic pattern, suggesting the daily cycle of movement and rest. Island and creek appear intermittently, often marking changes in terrain or moments of navigation difficulty. Hill spikes only occasionally — usually when the explorers climb to take measurements or to describe the surrounding landscape. Together, these patterns form a linguistic map of motion and observation.

Finally, the Collocates Graph between river, side, and men highlighted the relationship between nature and human action. The explorers’ perspective is one of constant interaction with their environment — crossing sides, battling currents, and recording every physical detail. The human experience in the journals is inseparable from the geography it describes.

Comparison with AI Analysis

To contrast Voyant’s statistical reading, I used an AI text-summarization tool to generate a thematic overview of the same journal entries. The AI emphasized exploration, endurance, and encounters with Indigenous groups, framing the text as a narrative of perseverance and progress. While this summary captured the emotional tone, it missed the repetitive rhythm that Voyant exposed — the constant cycle of “set out,” “camped,” and “passed.” This difference demonstrates how AI tools infer meaning through generalization, while Voyant focuses on surface structure and repetition. Both are valuable: Voyant reveals how the explorers wrote, while AI highlights what we tend to interpret from that writing.

Presentation

I embedded my Voyant visualizations — the Cirrus, Trends, Collocates Graph, and a AI-graph using Chatgpt in order to compare. Each visualization provides an interactive window into how 19th-century exploration language functions almost like a dataset: quantifiable, patterned, and deeply tied to physical movement. The color palette and layout are minimal to keep the focus on the text itself.

Significance

This project shows how digital tools can uncover the underlying structures of historical writing. In The Journals of Lewis and Clark, words like river and camp reveal how exploration was recorded as a series of physical acts rather than emotional reflections. Voyant captures the expedition’s repetitive momentum — its daily rhythm of travel, rest, and observation — while the AI tool reinterprets that same data as a narrative of heroism and endurance. Together, they demonstrate how Digital Humanities bridges quantitative and qualitative reading, transforming historical documents into dynamic maps of human experience.