Author: Carly Pavoni

Carly Pavoni is from Fairfield, CT. She is a freshman at Bucknell University that is undeclared in the arts and sciences school. She is on the track and field team at Bucknell University.

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final blog

Final Latrobe Blog

After hearing this final assignment our whole group really rose to the challenge and took it as an opportunity to create something that’s never been done before. As Professor Faull states, “the genre of Moravian memoir has not received much attention from North American spiritual autobiography” (Faull, 248). Turning the world one step at a time into a more accessible, digital place was never something I thought I would be involved in. It was a very interesting, unique process that I was honored to be apart of.

Looking at our research question “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships?”, it was hard to give a single answer. There were many aspects of Esther’s connection with God that impacted her in different ways. I truly believe that her dedication to the Lord lead to positivity however there were many branches that we explored through her life. My biggest challenge throughout this final project was viewing this question as an exploration. Coming to a single conclusion wasn’t possible. There were many different ways our group found ways to explore our research question by using distant and close reading tools such as voyant tools, story map js, contextual events, the digital edition, timeline, and TEI tagging. Including all of these in our final website was a challenge however my teammates and I were more than successful in accomplishing this goal.

Starting this project, it seemed like there were so many aspects to include in one project. However, using a WordPress website was a very useful database. Our first challenge we had as a group was figuring out how to work all the resources available in WordPress. Many of us were not technically advanced with this database. Luckily, for my final project in my foundation seminar course we had people from the library come in to teach us how to work WordPress in order to create a personal website. I was able to guide our group in this portion of the project, especially in the beginning when dealing with the formatting. After I created the website our group had to choose a theme. Our group came together and gave each other different options for the group to explore until we found the right one.

Then for formatting, having different tabs along the toolbar made it easy to show how each tool helped us come to different conclusions for the extent Esther was connected with God and how it helped her journey. When our group started this project, the first thing we did was make these tabs. It made it easy for the viewer to not get overwhelmed with the amount of information available and it was easy to access.

The toolbar includes many tabs with drop down menus

We laid out all of the things that we needed to include to accurately represent our exploration. Once we were able to see all of the tasks that needed to be completed, we divided and conquered. We made a group google doc and equally split up the work depending on what we thought we could best contribute to. We also took into consideration that I was editing and helping design the website therefore I didn’t have as much writing to do. This was all discussed in class and therefore written down and everyone followed their assignments. Our group did this very efficiently.

The list of tasks that were assigned to each group member at the start of this project

For our website content we included “about the authors” as it gave a background of who the researchers were and why we were doing this.  We also included a summary of Esther Latrobe’s memoir so that the viewers could understand who Esther was and what we read in her memoir. Including a picture along with a copy of the actual memoir gave the viewer the ability to empathize with the process we went through of transcribing this memoir. After including all the tabs that had to do with our exploration of our research question I went back and realized how important they were in answering our research question. Writing the conclusion tab gave a purpose to this website and made me reflect on all of the work we had done this semester.

An important tab that was included was the Story Map page. This “provided geographical context and depth to an expert interpretation of the past” (Bodenhamer 28). Placing this on the website demonstrated our conclusions that we drew from Esther’s physical geographical path. Having this map showed how motivated Esther was on her journey, part of me assumes that the Lord was her ultimate driving force for her to travel.

Page that includes the Story Map of Esther Latrobe

Also knowing when historical events happen in relation to each other “tell us about its visions of past and future” (Grafton 11). Including the timeline that we worked on for a good portion of class was necessary. Giving context with events that happened in places she traveled to gave a better understanding of Esther as a person. The website http://www.gracehillvillage.org/ gave a lot of history on a a special place in Esther’s life, Gracehill.

Including these two important tools as well as others, and including screenshots from them into the page, made it easy for the viewer to follow our research. All of these tabs helped explore the ultimate question of how did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships? The tools that we were given access to, we took full advantage of in order to explore this question fully. Seeing more and more about her life from different perspectives made it easier to see why she was motivated to do what she did. After transcribing the memoir and realizing how she handled her illness, we immediately realized how big a role having hope in the Lord played as it settled her feelings making it a more positive experience.

Exploring this question with my group was a positive educational experience. We worked together very easily and learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses after working together for a whole semester. We were very successful with our research and advancements to finding out about Esther Latrobe’s life.

http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/

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Blog #5

Blog #5

I didn’t expect mapping Esther Latrobe’s journey to be as insightful as it turned out to be. For me personally, I know that I have room to grow in the subject matter of geography. I have always had a terrible sense of direction. I also believe that I am not up to speed on geography. I am slowly learning how important and useful knowing the spatial differences between locations is as “we live in a physical world and routinely use spatial concepts of distance and direction to navigate our way through it” (Bodenhamer 14). When I was reading Esther Latrobe’s memoir I found myself reading the location of places she was moving to and leaving from, but never visualizing it. I read the place names and kept reading, not thinking that that would change how I think of Esther’s life. I thought I was close reading however, Storymapping JS gave me a new perspective of how much more I could learn from just a single location. Knowing where these major locations in Esther’s life were gave me a new perspective on how far she was truly traveling. As David Bodenhamer summarizes “human activity is about time and space” therefore using resources to “manage, relate, and query events, as well as to visualize them” is important for many aspects of piecing together history (Bodenhamer 22). I never had a true grasp on her journey until this experience of mapping the physical space.

For my Storymap JS I chose the few places Esther mentioned in her memoir as they all marked important places in her life. Her birth and death marked the start and finish of her journey. The Gracehill and Ayr were two places that Esther moved to on her journey that she spoke highly of in her memoir. There were significant events that all stacked on top of each other to form Esther’s path. These four places were far apart yet all marked important changes in Esther’s life.

After creating my story map I saw the physical space between Tytherton and Gracehill and had a few questions for Esther. I was curious as to why Esther didn’t include more about her journey in her memoir as the distance between these locations was so great. I would expect her to have life altering experiences along the way. The space difference between these two locations is much bigger than I thought from the lack of attention given to this experience in her writing. I now feel like she left parts of her life out of her memoir and there is more to what shaped Esther as an individual.

In general, creating a map can broaden a readers’ perspective. Often times, as I was, readers are more focused on the text rather than the actual location of places. Knowing the specific place at that time period gives plenty of context for the event. For historians this may give reasons and explanations for certain events. If there was tension in a nearby country or with a certain group within a country, at the same time and place, conclusions can be drawn. Piecing together history is much easier when you know the places things happened in relation to others. Bodenhamer summarizes this nicely by saying that landscape of culture and place is a powerful tool in “locating historical and cultural exegesis more explicitly in space and time” (Bodenhamer 28). These tools that allow us to “provide geographical context and depth to an expert interpretation of the past” are extremely useful especially when trying to understand the cause of certain effects (Bodenhamer 28).

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/ba6462a72c3fcb7093a45648ddf37add/latrobe-carly-pavoni/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

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Blog #4

Blog Post #4

Transcribing Esther Latrobe’s memoir has opened the doors to a deeper understanding of her life. At this point in the course being able to distant read gave me information from a bird’s view to summarize a large portion of text such as our 44 pages of Esther’s memoir. However, now being able to read through each word and designate a tag for it gave me a new meaning of Esther’s memoir. Although it was a unique and challenging experience, I have learned a lot from being on an editors side during this process.

Designating a tag for each word is not as easy as it may sound. As a group, we had to learn how to determine the labels for controversial words. We questioned if we should tag “Lord” and “God” as people. After reading Elena Pierazzo’s article I realized that our group was not alone with these debates on how and what to choose to tag. She states that “the question how to choose” is common in this process and we “must have limits” (466). To figure out these limits our group came to the conclusion to tag people if it was capitalized within the text. We believed that Esther meant these religious figures to be people if she capitalized it. Looking this carefully as the text made me question what Esther was trying to refer to, which gave me a new insight into her life. She believed Lord and God were people as she was very spiritual. Without making these editorial decisions and reading on a micro scale, I don’t think I would have as good of an idea of her beliefs as a person.

Another editorial decision our group came across was how to differentiate between tagging an emotion and health related word. Esther was sick the majority of her life for her memoir. This caused a lot of words to be related to illness, symptoms and feelings. Our group had to decide what “decision will reflect the purpose and intended use of the transcription” (471). We made rules in our group google docs to clarify and keep constant throughout our encoding process. Pierazzo’s statement “To achieve the purpose of the edition and meet the editors’ needs, one needs to ask which features bear a cognitive value, that is, which are relevant from a scholarly point of view” made me realize the true importance of what my group, as editors, were doing (469). If there were questions on if something should be tagged as an emotion or health, the context of the word was read aloud and decided as a majority vote. Whatever one had more of an importance for the overall meaning of the text was typically decided.

Having team members to double check you and clarify any confusions is a big help however working with a group takes a variety of large types of communication. For our coding of our memoir to be successful and meet our overall purpose, we had to be tagging the same types of things.

 

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Blog #3 contextual research

Latrobe Timeline

Imagine reading a textbook not in order? First reading about the first vaccine, and then reading about the cholera pandemic. This wouldn’t make sense as you would question why we didn’t use vaccines to help end this pandemic quickly or have the medical knowledge to treat it. All in all, chronology of history plays an important role. Knowing when historical events happen in relation to each other “tell us about its visions of past and future” (11). This helps historians as well as citizens analyze the cause and effect of the world. Although it doesn’t directly provide the cause and effect, it gives us the information to draw conclusions about it.

Creating Esther Latrobe’s timeline has made me realize what a big role chronology plays. Grafton made me realize that society does hold chronology at a “relatively low status … as a kind of study” (10). Until this project I never would have given credit to how much surrounding events of a certain historical event tells the analyzer. Putting events into relation with each other helps draw conclusions that the event wouldn’t give us. For example, in Esther Latrobe’s timeline, we learned the cholera pandemic was during the time period Esther suffered from various diseases. As an analyst, knowing that this pandemic was going on I could draw conclusions on why Esther was constantly ill. Medically, sanitation wasn’t superb and many germs were being brought overseas. I agree that chronology should be “held a status higher than the study of history itself” (10).

Geography also helps show where these events were happening world wide. Although it would be time consuming, we could theoretically place Esther’s travels throughout the years on a map. This can also help build off chronology as we would see what events were going on in certain areas of the world. Knowing that the Evangelical Revival was happening when Esther was in Ireland helps explain why Esther grew up relying so much on faith.

Having a physical line to display these events on is a good basis for displaying the chronology of events. Having events one after the other shows chronology however doesn’t ensure the importance of one event over the other. Time is shown but a story is not.