The Library of Congress Chronicling America’s database serves as the main source of archives for this thesis. There were about 267 newspaper articles that were combed through and catalogued based on date and contents. One limitation of this study is that this database and the newspaper pages used do not contain every news article written on Mata Hari. However, they still encompass a large and diverse collection of American media. The newspaper articles come from forty-eight states and the territory of Alaska (none from Hawaii ) and multiple cities from each state, making the sample representative of the United States overall. The books cited in this thesis were found in Archive.org and published in the United States. The books were also and reviewed or mentioned in American newspapers found in the Library of Congress online database.
For each chronological period, an advanced search was conducted with the filters of English only newspapers and the words “Mata Hari.” To avoid search errors, I meticulously combed through and read each newspaper in the LOC Chronicling America online database that came up as referencing Mata Hari. This way I could catalogue the contents, date, and the relativity. I could also make sure the numbers were correct, such as identifying that all the newspapers actually mentioned Mata Hari and not another word or a different “Mata Hari”, i.e. not the person.
This is the advanced search in the Chronicling America online database. The database searches 21,442,705 newspaper pages.
To organize the newspapers I used Zotero. I created multiple folders to categorize by year and contents, as well as labeled which newspapers I was thinking of using in my thesis.
After organizing the newspapers, the data was put into excel spreadsheets to create visual representations of the sources found. The data was then arranged into a visual format in Tableau that best communicated and represented the information provided. From this process, I was able to see the data organized in a new way and explain the conclusions found, such as Mata Hari’s trend in media and its reasons or the frequency of newspaper articles that connected Mata Hari to the “Orient.” To make the map the software ArcGIS was utilized to visually represent her movements in World War I.