Author: Brendan

I am a sophomore at Bucknell University, majoring in Mathematical Economics and minoring in Computer Science.

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final blog

Final Blog

The final project, in my opinion, serves as a culmination of everything we have learned and applied thus far in The Humanities Now!. Through the duration of this course, we have learned about the varies methodologies of the digital humanities, and how many different ways words in a text can be analyzed.

I believe the website is super useful in that every tool we have used to analyze the memoirs can be represented on there through the use of iFrame html code. Through the creation of separate pages for each tool, I was able to show many different aspects of each memoir we had. The ultimate goal of the website was to answer our research question.

The home page first introduces our research question, “Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian People according to our memoir? If so, how does it play into their lives?”. This is the first thing people see on our website, and it is the question we are using all of our technological tools to analyze. Right after the research question, we listed all of the various technologies used, as to accredit them. I also included a picture from my Anna Elizabeth Rauch memoir as to show an example of a typical page we had to each transcribe.

The first tab on my website isn’t a tool at all, it’s an “About the Transcribers” tab. I felt that the first priority in this project was to give credit to those who deserve it, so I put biographies of my teammates as the first tab.

The next tab was my “List of Memoirs” tab. For this tab, we decided to include the memoirs for each person. The applications Oxygen and Github Desktop proved to be really useful for this part of the project. With the help of Mrs. Jakacki, I was able to convert our individual memoirs from text into an HTML format, which means that it is viewable on the website. I also found a picture of a Moravian settlement and HTML coded it in to precede each memoir, as if to establish an initial setting.

The next tab is “Tag Frequencies”. This tab utilizes the applications “Google Fusion” and “Oxygen”. I provided a link for each memoir protagonist that leads right to a Google Fusion sheet. On this sheet are the entities broken down for each memoir. This was chosen because we needed to dive into the individual word usage more than the memoir as a whole. If we want to really delve into the research question, we need to look deep between the lines of the memoir The application Oxygen was useful in that we were able to TEI tag each memoir. This means that every name, date, place, emotion, or health status was tagged with an HTML tag, and then those various tags were exported to a .CSV file. With this .CSV file, Google Fusion was able to analyze various aspects of our entities, including creating a network between the different tags, and creating a map of memoir locations.

The next tab is “Timeline”. I believe a TimeLine is important in that it can chronologically show the memoirs , which is essential to our research question. For this task, we used the online application TimeLineJS, which involved using google sheets as well. Since our group had a few different memoirs, we had a conglomerate timeline that overlapped the events for each protagonist. I found it interesting to see the events that happened simultaneously with the protagonists, even though they happened thousands of miles apart. One struggle we found was in the initial interface of the timeline, as it was not able to initially combine all of our people into one Timeline. After a few hours of technological struggle, we figured it out. I can also attest that secondary sources were helpful for making my part of the timeline contextually correct, as there is not much setting given within the memoir. The first website I used was a project by a volunteer curator named Margaret. She wrote about the Mesopotamia Plantation in Westmoreland, Jamaica, and how the Barham family ruled oppressively over the plantation.  The TimeLineJS actually had an exportable HTML format that I was able to integrate into our website. I think this is an essential part of the website.

The tab after is the StoryMapJS tab. StoryMap JS was my personal favorite tool to use for analyzing because it provides a spatial context for the memoirs. I believe Bodenhamer explained it best in his paper, when he said, “[Mapping] promises an alternate view of history and culture through dynamic representation of memory and place, a view that is visual and experiential, fusing qualitative and quantitative data within real and conceptual space” (Bodenhamer, 29). Telling the spatial story of each memoir was essential to answering the research question in that the lengths the protagonists went to fulfill their Moravian duties conveys their undying commitment to the congregation. I didn’t quite have the full story on Anna Elizabeth Rauch coming into this, but Professor Faull supplied me with the only book I could find on Mesopotamia, “A Tale of Two Plantations.” This book actually mentioned Rauch specifically, as well as her goals and ambitions in Jamaica. I was able to put this on our website because each StoryMapJS had an embed code that used iFrame, which is compatible with WordPress.

The following tab is “Voyant.” Voyant is an online application that takes an input of a text file, and analyzes different aspects of the file, such as the most prevalent word, or the most frequent adjacencies. This was chosen so that information visualization could take place. Whitley stated it best in his paper when he said, “The virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be” (Whitley, 188). I enjoyed Voyant in that it had a multitude of options to analyze text such as Cirrus (Word Cloud based on word frequencies) or my personal favorite, the WordBerry (turns words into ‘berries’ that light up based on the occurrence of word adjacencies). For the website, I used Voyant on a text file that was conglomerate of all of our memoirs together in order to analyze the entirety of the Bethlehem Memoirs.

Next on the tab list is Documentation This was basically a page that gave a link to every software/application used and what purpose it served in our project. This page was important to include so it would be possible to replicate our exact methodology of analysis on another set of memoirs.

The next was more for fun than anything, but It’s labeled Moravian Music. I found a Spotify playlist that featured Moravian Music, so I embedded it into the website. It provides a neat musical take on the lives of the Moravians, and I found it to be pretty relevant to our subject matter.

 

The last tab we included was a Works Cited page, in which we cited all of the sources we used in class, and some secondary sources used for our memoirs.

 

Creating this website was a great experience, and I believe I have become more technologically fluent from this. I have also developed a passion for the humanities through this class. It has been a great year!

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Blog #5

Blog #5

     Having the opportunity to use StoryMapJs was a unique one that has never been presented to me in any other class. I had done much of the visualization before in high school with tools similar to Voyant, and I had made timelines for almost all of my history classes, but being able to incorporate a whole new dimension, location, into my analysis is really something quite unique.

     While analyzing the space that Anna Elizabeth Rauch and her fellow missionaries covered on a map, I was able to see just how much distance they covered, and I realized the physical toll that this took on them. In the memoir, Anna passed away from rheumatic fever. From looking at this map, I can safely assume that the long travel across all of Jamaica was moderately harmful to her immune system, thus contributing to her demise. I think this is what Bodenhamer means when he says “All spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there (Bodenhamer 16). Now that I could see the full space that they covered, I was further able to understand the story.

     Relative to this time period, the concept of space and stance is extremely significant. In 1752, moving transnationally and even transcontinentally was a very strong commitment. Nowadays, it can take hours and sometimes even days to move that distance. In that time period, it took weeks, sometimes even months, to cover that span.

     Spatial Humanities is definitely more relevant to this time period because of the introduction of Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. Bodenhamer is an advocate of this practice, and he states that GIS is a “seductive technology” and that its images “appeal to us in ways more subtle and powerful than words can” (Bodenhamer 17). I feel that GIS is one of the most efficient ways to analyze space for the field of humanities.

     Anna Elizabeth Rauch’s journey did cover half the distance of Jamaica, but once she got to Mesopotamia (in Westmoreland), she mainly went from there to New Carmel and back, thus not providing for much GIS analysis. Also, there were not many maps available that had specific detail about where the plantations exactly were. Bodenhamer believes that GIS “favors precise data that can be managed and parsed within a highly structured tabular database”(Bodenhamer 23). GIS may not have been the best for this memoir, but it should be ideal for most.

     Since the missionaries didn’t move around much once they arrived at the sugarcane plantation, I decided to depict different Moravian Stations in Jamaica for most of my slides. I told the story of Anna, and then mapped a new location that a station was created upon. As Anna and her fellow missionaries completed more work in Mesopotamia, I would show the precise location of other stations, thus conveying the spread of the Moravians. I believe that this was the best way of representing the information in that it could properly give a scope to how large the Moravian movement was in Jamaica, and what overall effect they had on the slave populations there.

Find the link for my StoryMapJs here: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/cb5a3878723de184037f5257d0519d56/anna-elizabeth-rauch/index.html

 

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/cb5a3878723de184037f5257d0519d56/anna-elizabeth-rauch/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

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Blog #4

Blog #4

     Marking up my transcription was actually an integral aspect to my understanding of the text. I feel as if being able to analyze the text through breaking down different aspects of the words was really helpful in that it made me feel closer to the actual words and meanings of the text itself. Instead of just reading every small word individually, I was able to see how every word shaped the overall meaning of the text due to tagging.

     I feel as if the Bethlehem memoirs in specific were important with regards to the aspect of understanding how the memoirs interrelate. Our memoirs were different from the other memoirs in that we had several different authors all from the same relative time period, rather than just one single memoir. This method of marking up was also unique with our Bethlehem memoirs in that we had varying accounts of mentioning the word “Lord”, “Savior”, or ”Jesus”. To remain consistent throughout, we decided as a group to tag any occurrences of the Holy Spirit as a person. We had to make some cuts on what should be considered tangible, and what should not be considered taggable. As Pierazzo says, “informed choices need to be made on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted” (Pierazzo 467).

     Collaborating with the rest of my editorial board (group) also heavily influenced my perspective on the memoirs as a whole. I feel as if when it was just me editing my own memoir, I had a single perspective on which words should be tagged. When I gave it to the rest of my group to revise , they pointed out aspects of my memoir that I hadn’t previously considered taggable, and thus I was able to get a more full sense of my memoir.

     I really enjoyed using TEI with my memoir. I think Pierazzo summarized it best when she said “to all intents and purposes there is no limit to the information one can add to a text—apart, that is, from the limits of imagination” (Pierazzo 466). Using technology to actually be able to analyze all accounts of different aspects of these memoirs was an invaluable opportunity, and is a “much less limiting” medium to engage in analysis. (Pierazzo 464).

     I also believed that learning how to use this software gave me a strong insight on how to apply to this to other literature that I may encounter. I have gotten a much firmer understanding of html and how computer processes and systems work, so I feel like I have a more diverse approach to the digital humanities now. I now have a knack for transcription AND a knack for using the technology associated with analyzing those said transcribed texts.

    Overall, I believe that I have a much more complete and wholistic grasp on the Bethlehem memoirs, but specifically that of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I now understand more of why she did what she did because I tagged different aspects of her emotions and her health. When I had read the memoir previously, it seemed a little dry, and I was confused about the sequence of events that occurred and why they happened. Now I know how Anna’s emotions and state of mind shaped her journey working in Jamaica on the Mesopotamia plantation.

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Blog #2 contextual research

Grafton & TimelineJS Analysis

Blog # 2

Through reading Grafton’s Introduction, I learned that the two modes of representation are chronology and geography. These two modes immensely help clarify historical events, but they also obscure events. With regards to determining all there is to know about a certain event, these two modes help immensely because we know exactly WHEN and WHERE that particular event happened. With this, we can make deductions or inferences about why that said event occurred.

Timelines are actually less than 250 years old (Grafton 14). All they really are is a way of visualizing the numbers that we use to record our history, but they can also restrict our outlook on life. Grafton says “The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have” (Grafton 14). It makes time way more linear than it has to be and almost completely removes the flexibility of our concept of time. It has been hard to come to terms with these ideas and modes of representation, but I have done it successfully. By telling us a one-way story, they have told us a chronology of our perception of the world, but have also erased our opportunity to perceive time as a story.

This concept is actually extremely relevant to my group’s project. We were assigned the Bethlehem memoirs to transcribe an analyze. Other groups’ assignments were the memoir of one person, but we had several different writers to transcribe. So as other groups would have one coherent timeline for all of their events, we had 4 or 5 separate, overlaying timelines.

With this in mind, conceptualizing the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation was near impossible. We were just given seemingly unrelated transcriptions with no background. We had to use different sources to get a deeper understanding of what we read. For example, Professor Faull gave me a book titled “A Tale of Two Plantations”, which depicted the lives of slaves in the Mesopotamian slave plantation in Jamaica, and how the Moravian missionaries brought the Gospel to them.

 

Viewing the timeline as a rigid linearity would be ineffective, as there are multiple stories going on at once. Grafton says that our idea of time “is so wrapped up with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually impossible” (Grafton 13). The key here is flexibility, and being able to perceive several chronologies at once. TimeLine JS made this flexible view possible by stacking the different events on top of each other as they occurred.

Overall, using TimeLine JS made analyzing these events easier in that it gave a way to compare the events throughout time. This has given a deeper meaning to all of our separate work; it has integrated everything we’ve worked for together.