I enjoyed this process of digital text creation because I liked the problem solving aspect that came with deciphering the words on the image. I liked uncovering and understanding the stories of the Moravians’ and learning about their lives. The transcription process itself was a bit challenging, especially at the beginning. It took me a while to get used to the handwriting and to figure out what was being said. The cursive made it particularly difficult at making out each letter in any given word. Also, because these documents were so old, there were ink drippings on the page, so it was hard to distinguish between ink drippings and dots that could be part of the the letters “i” or “j.” Another problem that I faced during the process of creating digital transcriptions was that because the artifacts are so old and that there is only one of them, they are stored in archives and we were unable to use the physical document to base our transcription off of. As a result, we had to use pictures of the archives which sometimes were blurry. However, we were able to get new images of the pages we could not read and were able to overcome this problem. The more reading I did, the better I got at it and I learned that printing the images and then figuring out the words was much easier for me. When I could not make out a word or a phrase, I would ask Paige, the professors in the class, and the research assistants who came in to help out. They were extremely helpful in deciphering the words I was unable to make out.
The memoir of Harriett Lees was written by her sibling. She died at age thirty in 1892 and was very sick with a bad cough and lung inflammation up until her death. Faith was something that was extremely important to her because she was brought up learning the principles of the Church of England. She often cited the Bible and was very moved by spirituality. Lees lost her brother which was extremely devastating to her. She would go to church often to talk with and pray to him and knew that they would soon be reunited. She was often sick and suffered from bad coughs and lung issues. She was married and had a son. Near her death, she lost her sister which was devastating to her and caused a lot of anxiety. She stuck with her faith, even until the end and helped those in need as much as she could.
s://docs.google.com/document/d/1sEJf1rOOI8QlH_7b7A_jvwiJSdMqXB2PzXwJ74NYOZ0/edit#
Hailey Zimmerman is a sophomore finance major at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. She is from Darien, CT.
