Author: Brendan

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

For my group’s transcriptions, we analyzed the Bethlehem memoirs, which include memoirs about Joseph Lingard, Henry Unger, Anna Elizabeth Rauch, and others. Since these memoirs are typically associated with the Christian church, we wanted to find out what kind of impact the church had in their lives. Our decided central question is: Was the Congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of the Moravian People?

The manuscript that I analyzed was about the life of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I had the first five out of the nine pages of the small account of her life and “departure”. In these first few pages, Anna travels to Jamaica to visit her slaves on the Mesopotamia slave plantation. Throughout the manuscript, Anna praises God for her safe travels to Jamaica. She first started at Port Royal, and then retired to Carmel, where she came down with rheumatic fever. At that time, they didn’t have a cure, so rheumatic fever was potentially terminal. She felt a little better later on, and went to visit her slaves every now and then in Mesopotamia. Anna was really friendly with the slaves, and she also maintained a great relationship with God at this time. She became really weak in 1762, and eventually reached the point where she could barely move. At one point, her husband proposed her to go to Mesopotamia. She felt too weak to go, but went anyways, insisting she had made out with her Savior concerning it. In this last page of my part of the memoirs, she confronted to Charles while crying, and said her final goodbyes to him, because she knew she was terminal.

Voyant proved to be a superior way to analyze the transcriptions as a whole, as well as my individual transcription. Voyant was especially helpful in that the word analysis tools provided proved to be extremely helpful to me.

I liked the cirrus in that it gave me a physical manifestation of all of the different word frequencies. I also enjoyed the collocates feature, which gave the most occurring context of each word. One of the most prominent adjacencies was with “dear” and “savior”, which helps to convey their attitude towards religion. Whitney believes that “word clouds have proven to be quite popular…for their practical ability to visually identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitney 199).

My personal favorite way to analyze the text was with TermsBerry. This was a visually appealing way of analyzing the context of the most prominent words in the text. The TermsBerry consists of “berries” of different sizes with regards to the frequency of the word. When you scroll over that word with the mouse, it glows green and the words that are in context with that word glow up in red.

These specific tools would not be available for me if it was not for the growing industry of digital humanities. Before the age of modern technology, it would not be possible to perform such a vast analysis on a text this size in the same span of time. As in the words of Whitney “the forces of the digital era are rethinking the ways that read at the same time that American literature scholars are rethinking the ways that we archive large bodies of texts” (Whitney 201).With these means of analysis, I am able to draw significant conclusions about the text, such as that religion and the congregation are proposed with a positive connotation. It seems as if the missionaries genuinely enjoy their devotion to the Lord, and their life revolves an optimistic viewpoint of our Creator.

For the entire Bethlehem memoir transcription, my words with the highest frequency were savior(20), heart(18), dear(14), year(13), congregation(11), and brethren(10). Upon seeing these visualizations, I started to derive an answer for my central question. As in the wise words of Whitley, “The goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inquiry” (Whitley 189). The pattern that consistently emerges in all of the visual tools is the prevalence of all the ecclesiocentric behavior.

Brendan

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

Tags Church, Jamaica, Missionary, moravian, Rheumatic Fever, savior

Assignment #1

Assignment 1: Moravian Lives Transcriptions

Post author By Brendan
Post date September 12, 2018
No Comments on Assignment 1: Moravian Lives Transcriptions

The transcription of the Moravian manuscripts was a very unique opportunity to have. I’ve never been the first person to transcribe anything, so having the opportunity to essentially make history through these transcriptions is amazing.

I enjoyed trying to see the stories that the author was trying to convey. I was assigned with transcribing Anna Elizabeth Rauch’s manuscript that detailed her life from 1756 to 1762. Working with these transcriptions felt like looking at life through a different lens. I also liked the format of the transcription website; it was easy to mark People, Places, Corrections, etc.

I decided to take the role of group leader for this assignment because I felt like I needed to be more of a leader in life, and this was a good start. My role was to assign people which pages to transcribe and facilitate the Google Docs document that we would all paste our answers on. It was a rewarding role in that I got to know three more people pretty well, and coordinate us working together as a team to get these transcriptions done.

One of the primary struggles I faced was trying to read Anna Elizabeth Rauch’s handwriting. Anna wrote in Old English, so it was hard to comprehend a lot of her messages. The ink from one line oftentimes bled into the next line, so a strategy was to hold a finger right above the words to separate the individual lines.

Also, there were many words and abbreviations that were used which I had never seen before. This was due to a shift in our language throughout centuries. As the Old English words became more common, it became easier to transcribe what Anna said. Also, having a new group of friends to help me with whatever I couldn’t figure out was super useful.

Google Docs Link

Anna Elizabeth Rauch Page 1

Anna Elizabeth Rauch Page 2

Anna Elizabeth Rauch Page 3

Anna Elizabeth Rauch Page 4

Anna Elizabeth Rauch Page 5

Brendan

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

Tags Anna Elizabeth Rauch, Bethlehem, Church, savior, sister

Blog #1

As our overall understanding of modern technology progresses, so does the potential of Digital Humanities. One of the main advantages of Digital Humanities is that these archival documents can be processed onto a digital library, where they can be easily accessible from all over the world. Somebody can be continents away, and still be able to read the manuscript of Jane Austen. Another major advantage of creating a digital artifact from archival documents is that finding individual words or sections is made extremely easier and more convenient. This could help better process all of the messages that the specific author was trying to convey in his/her work or manuscript.

There are few disadvantages to creating a digital artifact from archival documents. In my opinion, the rarity of these documents that have been preserved for hundreds of years is significantly decreased when this digital transfer happens. These documents are now easily accessible, and thus lose part of their historical importance .With the digital version of the manuscript, one would be missing so much of the actual piece. Mainly, the digital transfer impedes on the aesthetic of the documents.

As I explored the Moravian Lives projects, I found it shared quite a few similarities with other large-scale DH Projects. I found out that along with these other projects, Moravian Lives heavily relies on crowdsourcing to keep it running. Many people contribute to help trace the history of the Moravian Church.

I believe we are interacting with the textual material more on the screen than on the page. In the age of digital humanities, the physical interaction with the textual material is primarily composed of transcribing it to digital format. There are not really efficient ways to analyze the material when it is presented as one long, physical manuscript. We are interacting a lot more with the material on the screen than on paper. With all of the material digitized, it makes it easier for us to analyze the text based on word usage (find the prevalence of a specific word with respect to each author) or find a certain part of the manuscript without having to read through the entire thing first. Our research practices are changing to involve more textual analysis than anything, and this allows us to make useful diagrams such as word maps or frequency charts.

Open-source and free digitized materials offer unbounded pedagogical opportunities. After doing a little bit of research, I found a website called DIRT, which is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. It provided an extensive list of downloadable programs for about forty or so different digital research techniques that could range from analyzing data relationships to even transcribing manuscripts!. DIRT is a public domain website, so student are able to use this for all of their digital humanities needs.The opportunities are seemingly endless in that there are so many different sources. For example, when I clicked “analysis”, there were at least one hundred different websites or programs that were provided. According to Whitley, this allows for “distant reading”. The data can be analyzed better because more connections are being established.

DIRT provides a great amount of resources to aid analysis

I believe that instead of supplanting our need to view the physical originals, digitized materials enhance the necessity and desire for archival work. Whitley explained how digital tools can help create more questions, which could result in a more complex look into the data. The realm of humanities has never been more excited than in this digital era. With digital humanities, we can now process manuscripts and data with more efficiency than we ever have in all humanity. This makes the necessity of archival work at an all time peak, because we have gained the ability to ubiquitously transcribe and analyze documents that were previously untouched and unmarked. The significance of humanities right now is at an all time high, and the more crowdsourcing we can get working on it, the more we’ll really be able to analyze all those who came before us!

Brendan

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