Abstract

The purpose of this study is to conduct a thematic linguistic analysis of survey responses to museum-quality images depicting various Native American and white settler encounters. The survey asked participants to provide written responses (fill in the blank prompts) to a selection of twelve images composed of photographs and paintings representing one or more of three overarching themes: violence, immersion, and goodwill/collaboration. The research focused on four demographic groups: Latter-day Saints, Native Americans, museum employees, and total participants. Each response was individually analyzed by hand and assigned appropriate classification tags based on the types of words their responses contained including one or more of the following categories: positive, negative, neutral, pushed fear/propaganda, guilt, curiosity, questioning image/artist, questioning accuracy, loaded, wanting more information, and connection/empathy. After the initial analysis, I created word frequency corpuses to calculate word frequency for each image and group. The differing word frequency corpuses showed that high frequency 3 words did not change much among gender, age, or location but a large variation did exist among terms used less than five times. The identification markers that showed the most variance between interpretations of the artwork were museum employees and Native Americans.

Degree

MA

College and Department

Linguistics and English Language

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2022-12-15

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12612

Keywords

Perspective, Interpretation, Narrative, Native American, Museums, Artwork, Collective Guilt, Interpersonal Regret

Language

english

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