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Clouds are "a visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere, typically high above the ground" (or so Google says), and they come in all possible shapes and sizes. It's easy for random winds and temperatures to turn these random islands of floating water into animals, plants, objects, people, or whatever else we feel like seeing when we look up at them. In that way, cloud watching really says more about the watcher than the cloud.
Word clouds! . . . are also clouds, kind of. Well, we just call them that, but I think they also fit this idea. Looking into a word cloud of search terms, you can often see the central points and recurring ideas of the topic it came from, and you can also see the thought process and search strategies of the person who made it (that is, what that person "sees" as they explore subject matter). As I looked over the scholarly landscape around the topic of my research project β the overhunting of buffalo in the late 1860s to 1870s and how it reflected exploitation and imbalances of power between Euro-Americans and Indians β I kept track of the key words and phrases I used in search engines like Google Scholar, JSTOR, EBSCOhost, and the UCI Library Search.
Here's the word cloud made from all those terms:
It seems like a lot of words when I look at it now, but it also seems quite little compared to how much I've looked around for secondary sources and how many papers I've collected up to this point. The word cloud is centered around the major terms "buffalo," "bison," and "hunt," which is as expected considering my research topic is all about buffalo hunting (bison is another name for the American buffalo). On the next "tier" β words that don't take up as much space but are still pretty large, meaning I used them often in my searches β are terms like "army," "military," and "Indian." These form a larger context around the decline of bison in the 1800s. There is a large discussion around the involvement of the United States government and military in this story, specifically how much or how little they contributed to the drop in the buffalo population. In many instances, military officials (such as General Sheridan as seen in the word cloud) actively encouraged hunting bison in order to deplete a staple American Indian food resource. Some of the other words in the cloud have to do with things like "leather" and 'hides," which relates to the economic factor, one of the biggest motivators for white hunters to continue putting the pressure on buffalo herds. The rest of the smaller phrases are notable people who appear often in the scholarly conversation, mostly officials in the military.
Most of the words in this word cloud I collected by noting recurring terms in my primary sources of focus and in other primary sources related to the topic, or by scanning the footnotes and endnotes of secondary sources I'd read. As I looked through scholarly works, they directed me to more papers and more articles and on and on. Along the way, I kept track of common phrases and people that appeared both in the body of each secondary source and in its notes, and I used them to propel my search even further. At this point, the word cloud makes it clear that I've mostly been focusing on the army side of the conversation. However, I have only partially explored the economics and trade side of this historical event, something that may seem at first to be unrelated to my focus on Indian-White relations yet actually plays into it heavily. Examining my search term word cloud so far has given me a better understanding of where I've been going with my research but as I move deeper into this topic, my word cloud will certainly be shifting around and becoming a more complete representation of the context around these bison hunts.
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