Author: Bhagawat Acharya

Bhagawat Acharya is a Computer Science major at Bucknell University. He is interested in working at a cyber security firm after graduating from Bucknell University in 2020. Currently, he is a junior fellow for the Discovery Residential college.

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Blog #2

Blog #2: Samuel Tippett

In this group project, we transcribed the writing of Samuel Tippett. Below is a summary of his writing.

Samuel Tippett was born in year 1711 in Bitton. From his mentions of wanting to die, he appears to be depressed. He mentions that he wishes he had died earlier in life and talks about how he will go to hell. His father died from alcohol consumption when he was young, and he was raised by a single mother. His mother was strict on him but allowed him to go play with other boys. He lied and said nasty words when he was young. He regrets not practicing religion when he was younger as it could have helped him become a better person from the beginning. When he was 10 years old, he got more and more corrupt as he started working at a coal pit. His mother wanted him to become an apprentice, but he did not want to leave. Tippett got married in 1736 and had eleven children. He went to Hannam Mount and learned from a preacher that Jesus Christ would accept and forgive anyone, including sinners like him. He started fasting multiple times each week and prayed about a dozen times each day in the name of Jesus. He saw Christ not only as his savior but also his best friend, making complaints to him. He saw himself as having no friends other than Christ as He was the only person that could satisfy his poor heart. He became a part of a group that would gather and pray. He had found happiness in religion. Tippett spent a lot of time with his family as he grew older. He still prayed daily but wanted to be closer to Christ, he needed Christ as his life drew closer to an end. He needed his best friend and wanted to spend the rest of his time with Him.

Religion and faith gave Tippett hope in life. Before he turned to religion, he saw himself as a bad person, a sinner, someone who deserved to go to hell. Once he started praying, once he turned to Christ, he saw himself as a much better person than he used to be. His faith gave him a new perspective in life. If Jesus could forgive someone with such a poor heart as him, then maybe his life was worth living. He wished he was born in the time of Jesus as he would do anything even die for Him. Religion allowed him to be a new much happier and a better person.

Since he did not use any periods, we were unable to correctly examine how many sentences he had but his vocabulary density is 0.209, meaning he used 2 unique words for every 10 words he wrote. His total word count came to be about 3,800 words. Since he did not continue his education, he does make many spelling mistakes. Using Voyant and the tools it provides, we were able to do distant reading that Whitley talked about. We are able to analyze words like we would numbers and data. We were able to use it to do spatial reading where we could find words and phrases and the patterns between them. This helped determine what Tippett’s intention and overall tone was for the writing. We used these digital tools to complement the old text to gain an understanding on the writing.

Click on the picture to view the Cirrus

Through this Cirrus, we can see that a few of his most frequent words are heart, times, time, love, Jesus and poor. As with most transcription done in class, it is not surprising that Jesus fell into this list. We know that Tippett became a religious man and changed himself. This tool just allows us to see his other most frequent words.

Click on the image to view the Collocates

The Collocates tool allows us to see words that were connected and most frequently used in the range of each other. He used “poor” and “heart” together many times to refer to himself. He used “love” and “Jesus” to show that he loved Jesus and in return he knew Jesus loved him, no matter how much he had sinned in the past.

Click on the image to view the Trends

If we look at this relative frequency trend, we can see similar patterns to ones we see in the two previous tools. We see that soon after he starts using “Jesus” or “Christ”, he starts to use “love”. We can see the trends of the frequency of the most frequent words. His usage of “time” or “times” does not appear to correlate with other words most frequent words, but they do appear with less used words.

We transcribed Samuel Tippett’s writing and digitalized it. Using this digital edition of the writing, we analyzed it to conclude that turning to religion turned Tippett’s life around. He became a happier person and seemed to have found a purpose in life being a follower of Christ.

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Assignment #1

Assignment # 1: Samuel Tippet

Click on the picture above to open Samuel Tippet’s book.

I worked on transcribing the text written by Samuel Tippet. As with most older writings, it was confusing to understand the handwriting and a few words. Tippet might have been an educated man but he did make numerous spelling errors. Understanding the words such as ‘ye’ and ‘and’ were very difficult to understand. To transcribe the writing, I started off by reading, or trying, to read all that I could from the text. As I read it, I started to type what he is saying. If I had a difficulty understanding a word, I skipped that word, planning to come back to it later once I understood the context of the writing.

After writing a few sentences, I read back what I just digitized to ensure it made sense, even if spellings were incorrect. Doing this allowed me to understand Tippet’s point of view. He saw himself as a sinner, as a bad person starting from childhood. He talks about how he was a “bad boy” and got even worse as he grew up. He talks about wishing he had died earlier and talks about how bad he has been during his life. He had been through a lot, being raised by a single mother, as his father died when he was young. Knowing so much about him, I could make sense of a few illegible words or words that were hard to understand. Sometimes, it even helped me guess what he was going to write, what he was thinking. After doing all of this, I could go back and understand why he misspelt many words. I understood why he chose the words he did to describe himself. It helped understand why he was so religious, why he talked so much about Jesus. He was definitely an interesting man.

Click here for the latest Google Docs version of the text.

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Blog #1

Blog #1: On Material and Digital Archives

Historic artifacts help us get a glimpse of the past and how it compares with the present. Although a lot of these texts are preserved in their original condition, they are inaccessible to most of the population. Digital archiving helps address this problem as well as the problem of artifacts degrading over time. There are many advantages of creating a digital archive from historical artifacts. Digitalizing allows the artifact to be spread out while still being preserved in its original condition. Digital archiving allows for even more to be done with the artifact. We can transcribe the documents, perform word analysis to find the most important ideas and find patters that humans cannot find without the help of a computer. There are a few disadvantages of using primarily digital archive. A digital edition of an artifact might not invoke the emotions a physical copy does. With a physical edition, we can analyze the condition of the paper itself to see if there are any clues as to how things were. Nevertheless, digital archiving, if done properly, could replace the need for the physical copy.

As we digitalize more textual materials, the printed copy becomes less significant as a way to discover history and more of a collective item. An emphasis of the digital version helps the research because more people can access the text and contribute to a single project. As mentioned in the Whitley reading, it will help visualize the text and allow for both a distinct and a spacial reading. It will allow us to see the greater message behind the texts instead of just the text themselves. The Jane Austen archive, similar to the Moravian Lives archive, transcribes the old texts and shows both version, the digital new text as well as the original writing. This allows readers to understand the text using the digitalized text as well as get the experience of reading the original text.

These digital text allow us to perform complex tasks such as word frequency, so we can visualize how often a specific word or phrase is referred in a text. It allows us to see the connection between specific words or phrases, which we would not be able to see in the physical copy of the text. The digital archive allows us to quickly sort through various words and pick out the important ones whereas it would take a person time to do so in a physical archive. Digital archiving might even reveal information that were hidden by finding the patterns in the words that we cannot find. For example, on the right, the word frequency shows that the text referred to the Native Americans throughout history as “Indians”. Recently, that word has been used less frequently, showing how the views of people have changed over time.

Using both the digital and the physical archives, we can learn more about the past, or just preserve fragile texts and other artifacts. Although digital archives are reducing the necessity for the physical version of them, they are still important because sometime the physical copy might reveal something that the digital one cannot.

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Practice Blog

Bhagawat’s Practice Blog

The Six Degree of Francis Bacon project was founded by professors at Carnegie Mellon. It creates a network map for Francis Bacon, these people he knew or worked with. Through these networks, we are able to not only see how they are connected to Bacon, but also see their own networks. It allows us to see the shared network between people as well as a personal network of people such as King James I. The primary digital humanities focus of this project is visualization as it allows us to see the network and select different people and things. This project does use crowdsourcing as well as a statical analysis to find these connections. People can contribute information and connections to the project to make a more dense map of the connections. The perfect choice to display relationships between a large group of people is a network map. The connections represent the relationship between Bacon and others in an understandable manner.

Francis Bacon Network

 

Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscript is a project that preserve and archive Jane Austen’s fiction writing. It allows readers to see the writing in her own handwriting as well as a digital version. This project preserves and digitalizes the writings, making it easier for readers to access the writings. It brings all of the scattered collections to one place. It collects rare readings that are in libraries and private collection and allows anyone to read them. This way of archiving and digitalization works perfectly with the writings as it allows for more readers to have access to it.