This research centers on two periodicals: The Woman’s Exponent (1872–1914) and the Relief Society Magazine (1914–1970). Founded by Louisa Lula Greene, the Exponent was a deliberate response to severe anti-polygamist rhetoric that depicted Mormon women as "hypnotized, weak, poor and oppressed."[1] The newspaper served as a vehicle to foster religious community, promote female solidarity, and defend plural marriage as an enhancement of agency. However, the newspaper’s discontinuation in 1914 and the immediate publication of the Magazine reflected an organizational shift where growing church populations led to the marginalization of women from church hierarchy.
This project's methodology is intentionally interdisciplinary, utilizing digital text analysis tools to evaluate 100 years of women’s print culture. By employing AI-assisted coding, topic modeling (MALLET and Latent Dirichlet Allocation), and R Studio, the study analyzes 60,000 scanned pdf pages to identify long-term trends in articulated identity.
By visualizing original documents, transformed documents, and text analysis visualizations, I will bridge the gap between "close" and "distant" reading, as the poster will feature comparative side-by-side displays of original archival scans from the Exponent alongside their digital transformations into R Studio-ready text. My visualizations and presentation will illustrate the accessibility of text analysis through the use of AI coding as well as demonstrate the compelling conclusions attained from text analysis work that is steeped in quantitative methodology through distant reading and qualitative analysis in close archival reading practices. Through the statistical examination of word relationality and multicollinearity, the analysis evaluates the distance between word meaning, emotion, and articulation to reveal how women acted and reacted to shifting church and American cultures. Visualizations will demonstrate "word relationality" and "multicollinearity" in compelling geometric representations of how the statistical distance between concepts like "advocacy," "submission," and "identity" shifted over a century. These visualizations will also physically map the "hierarchical positionality" of women, showing how they shifted their articulated selves to align with evolving religious and American cultures.
By tracing these long-term trends, the poster argues that the printed word functioned as a source of "ontological power," allowing women to maintain a distinct religious community despite their formal administrative marginalization. Through this poster and contained visual evidence that traces changes in word usage and articulated identities, I argue that Mormon women—through their own printed words—exercised relational and ontological power to assert self-determination. This innovative approach of AI-assisted digital analysis offers a "30,000 foot view" of systemic religious cultural evolution, materializing how Mormon women functioned as agents of historical change and cultural cultivation.
[1] Meghan Harrington, “Limitation, Liberation, and The Latter-day Saints: The Establishment of Mormon Womanhood in the Woman’s Exponent 1872-1890,” (Thesis: Hollins University, 2019), 1.