Final Project Proposal: Breaking down the Colby Echo

For my final project proposal, I have decided to break down the Colby Echo during certain time periods of Colby’s past. I plan on choosing my time periods after reading “The History of Colby College” by Marriner and “Mayflower Hill: A History of Colby College” by Earl Smith. Once I do so, I will go into the Colby Echo archives thanks to Erin Rhodes and the special collections librarian team. I will then use Adobe premier to use the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC function which will let me make the scanned images into text documents. Once I do so, I will use the Voyant tools introduced by the ITS team which will allow me to analyze the words that come up in each Colby Echo and the frequency of them. Not only will this let me analyze the text more closely, but it will give me more context as to what was going on during the time period in which the Colby Echo was published. Since there are so many words that will come up, I plan on using specific words such as ‘scandal, conflict, protest,’ and any other words that symbolize disagreement. The reason why I want to search these words is to see how Colby has endured hard times during their past and how they grew from it. I want to see the growth of Colby College and analyze the different building blocks that have created Colby College today.