Author: Julianna Kim

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Blog #2

Latrobe Memoir

Esther Latrobe’s memoir is about her spiritual journey with God and her expression of her faith. She grew up in the early 19th century in Bristol, England and went to school in Tytherton, England. She later got married and soon died after due to childbirth. She explains in her memoir how her faith strengthened during her times of sickness.

Voyant shows the word count for the Latrobe corpus is 8,460 and 1,793 unique word forms. Those metrics are useful because they provide the vocabulary density which is 0.212. This can imply the writer’s level of education and thus socioeconomic status because an education requires time and money. In this corpus, the density doesn’t seem to be high but Latrobe talks about her faith so she uses the same expressions and phrases that are very common in Christianity. Another indicator of one’s education is the average length of one’s sentences. For example, in this memoir the average is 24.6 words per sentence. This seems longer than average which makes sense because Latrobe received an education in Tytherton. Another useful metric is keywords which tell the reader about the main ideas of a corpus. In the Latrobe memoir, the 5 main keywords are: lord, oh, dear, god and let. The most common collocates for “lord” are “pleased” and “grace” which were on the left and describe how Latrobe viewed God and her admiration for Him. The collocates for “oh” are similar to “lord” because “gracious” is one of them along with “Heavenly Father”. This shows how much Latrobe respects God and His presence in her life. For “dear”, the most common collocates are “Relative”, “Mother”, and “friends” on the right side which shows how Latrobe was a positive influence in the lives of her loved ones. The collocates for “god” are “oh” and “Lamb” on the left to describe their need for God and the well known Christian metaphor of Jesus being the Lamb of God since he is sinless and a sacrifice for Mankind. The main collocate for “let” is “me” which is used in the context of Latrobe praying to God for humility and wisdom which shows how faith played a significant role in how she wanted to live. The patterns prominent among the keywords and their collocates is that “oh”, “god”, “lord” and “let” are described with adjectives that depict God above Man and are followed by words like “me” which shows God’s authority over the one praying to Him. Another pattern the keywords share is they are in every part of the corpus, in the beginning, middle and end which emphasizes their role in expressing the memoir’s theme of Christianity and family.

The Voyant tools most commonly show the frequency of words, the context of keywords, and the relationships of words using distant and spatial reading since the tools create visualizations to help the reader understand the memoir. Franco Moretti in the Whitley reading states, “large scale patterns of publication and reception provide ‘a sharper sense of the overall interconnection’ of texts” (188). Rather than close reading, distant and spatial reading help the reader to see the theme that connects all the mains ideas of a text. Another point the Whitley reading makes is the overabundance of information technology offers makes the traditional way of  “inspection, sift and synthesis” difficult because it is too mentally draining. Platforms like Voyant save the reader from wasting their time and energy (192). The reading also says, “the mind is just as capable of extracting meaning from shapes and patterns as it is at processing written language” (193).

Comparing the Latrobe memoir to Bethlehem corpus, they have keywords in common like “dear” and similar in theme like “saviour” and “sister”. Both memoirs talk about Christianity and the importance of family in their daily lives. Looking at the common key words, it seems like Christianity and family were core values for the Moravian people which is interesting to note because American culture today shares those same values but the religious aspect is more prominent in American politics than pop culture.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=99820e285c977ba05ea07cb9f2c61684

 

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

The hardest aspect of the transcription process was learning to read 19th century British handwriting because everything I read now, whether it be textbooks or online articles, is in print. Although I learned how to read and write in cursive in grade school, it was hard reading a person’s handwriting because the letters were not always clearly written out. However, I do understand it is very difficult to write consistently, especially when writing memoirs that are 40 pages long. Another problem I faced was more technical because the pictures of the pages were blurry so it was hard to read the sentences at all. Also, I could not distinguish the different punctuation marks on some pages because they either looked like streaks of ink or other punctuation marks. Thankfully, Professor Faull had requested her colleagues to send clearer pictures so I was able to transcribe all of the pages. I realized it is crucial to have clear digital copies in order to transcribe and analyze any historic documents. Without clear documents, it is impossible to create accurate digital texts which is crucial for allowing anyone on the Internet to have access to information only scholars would have had without the digitization of historical documents. It was interesting to be able to read these documents because I think as a management student at Bucknell, I would have not had the opportunity to learn about the Moravian documents. It was interesting to read Esther Latrobe’s memoir because I would not have had the opportunity to learn about a Christian woman who lived in 19th century England otherwise. I was surprised to read the same phrases that Christians still use till this day like “The Lord Our Shepard”, “everlasting kingdom” and “he speaks, the universe obeys”. As a person who grew up in the Church, I never thought about whether or not Christians in the past centuries used the same jargon as modern day Christians even though the culture changed in reaction to society changing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JskmdGh4grdhqHksXQmYSCRA0D3VlchO1ceAMjTDobo/edit

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Blog #1

Blog Post #1

Because of the new wave of technology, people are able to gather more information and have it become more accessible to a larger audience. The ability to access a plethora of resources on various subjects gives digital archives an advantage over archival documents. It is more time efficient to access documents on an online database than searching through a physical collection of printed documents. Search mode enables people to save time by instantly looking up whatever information rather than manually looking through each print. Another advantage to creating digital versions of documents is the fact that physical documents deteriorate over time due to weathering and physical handling. However, a disadvantage of creating digital artifacts is losing the authenticity of the original works. The physical and written structure of printed documents and the style of handwriting get lost in translation when they are turned into digital artifacts. Due to this, learning about a period’s culture is not possible because of the disappearing evidence of handwriting styles, writing styles, etc.. The way people write shows the cultural expectations for that time period. For example, flowery poetry was popular from the late 1700s to the 1900s in Britain and the United States. Knowing the long, wordy style of “flowery poetry” it indicates what those cultures valued: artistic and emotive expression. Although digital documents can use visualization like word clouds to show the most commonly used words in a document, it does not show the adjectives in between which distinguishes flowery poetry from other styles. In terms of what kind of knowledge digital archives offer, they give people access to a multitude of documents from all time periods which enables them to make connections over long periods of time unlike physical archives which are more tiring to look though.

It is hard to answer the ultimate question of which method is better because each has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, the way people read digital versus print documents is different. So in a sense, digital artifacts do supplant our needs for print because visualization tools like word pattern graphs and text images that use shape, color, texture help the mind process the digital information better. However, reading online documents by browse and search mode encourages readers to skim and search for the information they want instead of reading slowly. Print documents require inspection, sift, and synthesis because they do not include visualization like word clouds. Close reading is a good skill for understanding the little nuances in a text and aids in understanding the information on a deeper level since it focuses on word choice and phrasing. To encourage that in digital texts, it might be effective to not put in so many images that it distracts the reader from reading the text itself. It is easy to mistake those images as conclusions themselves rather than a means to a conclusion.

Comparing the Moravian Lives project with other large DH projects, similarities like categorizing documents. The Moravian website has a map which enables the reader to visualize where the documents originate from. They are also categorized by language, country and archive. Quanitfying Kissinger also uses network analysis to visualize all the information sourced from the documents for comparison. Because large DH porjects have large quanitities of data, they use distant reading to visualize patterns to understand the overarching ideas.

 

 

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Practice Blog

Jules Kim 8/28/18

One of the DH sample projects I looked at was SeflieCity which uses network analysis and visualization to study demographics and patterns of the subjects and their images. Because the images were collected from Instagram,  a social media platform solely dedicated to images and videos, it makes sense to use Imageplots to assemble the pictures together to compare them one city at a time. This compilation helps the reader see the similarities and differences between all the different facial expressions of the subjects.  Beside a collage of pictures, the project also shows line graphs and charts to organize age, gender, poses, facial features, and moods. The project also incorporates a map of all the cities to help the reader visualize where the subjects are in the world and the extent to which Instagram can expand one’s network on a global level.

The second project I looked at was done by the University of Utah on the study of sonic and linguistic connections between words in text like poems, otherwise known as sonic topology. The usage of textual analysis is logical here because the study is based on texts. The words in an example of a poem are circled in different colors, depending on the category like identical rhyme, perfect masculine, perfect feminine, syllabic rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance and others. The examples are  annotated in the manner of close reading, focusing on word choice and phrasing to identify imagery, sound, metaphors to determine the meaning of these texts. There is a graph of words connected to each other by lines based on similarities in the previously mentioned categories.