God on the Stage: A Text Analysis of Frederick Douglass’s Religiosity (1845–1887)

This comparative study locates Frederick Douglass’s (1818–95) religiosity within his published autobiographies as well as his 1886–7 unpublished travel diary – taken as part of the Library of Congress’s Frederick Douglass Papers (1841–64). R-scripted text analysis of Douglass’s expressed faith is foregrounded through the generation of clean digital transcriptions using handwritten text recognition (HTR), the process of converting non-consistent images into computer-readable text. In training a HTR model to 90.60 per cent character accuracy and manually correcting its outputs, this article forms a practical study in foregrounding automated transcription to benefit archival research and leverages multiple technologies to uncover lexical patterns across disparate autobiographical works. In showing that the abolitionist’s introduction of humanistic themes holds little dependence to instances of religious expression, we challenge scholarly interpretations that Douglass committed to a hard pivot away from religious language and placed God ‘off-the-stage’ in his later works. In doing so, our approach demonstrates the range of techniques available to researchers auditing differences between private handwritten archives and public published accounts. This article therefore holds significance in documenting a scalable text extraction method on handwritten materials, digitized from smaller analogue library collections, while also advancing historical knowledge of Douglass’s use of religious language.