Author: Clayton Wright

Clayton Wright is an economics major at Bucknell University. He transferred to Bucknell from Bowdoin College in 2017. Before college, he grew up in Summit NJ and attended The Pingry School.

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final blog

Website Summary

http://tippetthumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

All the work my group has done this year was in hopes of answering the question, “How did religion give Samuel Tippett and others during this time a new life?” This Final Project allowed my group to take every tool that we have learned this semester and put it on display, and it provided us with the opportunity to answer our research question with a multitude of data and representations. We started this semester with a simple task of transcription, and that first step, which at the time seemed tedious, produced the framework for me to explore completely new ways of analyzing literature. From the beginning of my schooling experience until the start of this year, I believed that there was only one way to approach literature. My whole life I have read material and formulate an argument via essays. These essays that I wrote in high school and middle school were completely structured and did not allow for much creativity. We had the simple guideline of an introduction followed by three body paragraphs and then a conclusion. I spent six years of my life writing essays the exact same way. This changed a little when I came to college, but that change really only came in being able to use more than three body paragraphs (not extremely exciting!). This class has provided me with a completely different way of creating and presenting an argument and this final project shows an accumulation of all new ways my team and I have been able to analyze our Memoir and answer our research question.

Our Website has two main components to it. We have separated our material into categories of Digital Edition and Visualization. Under Digital Edition we provide the viewer with an opportunity to see the original copy of Samuel Tippett’s memoir along with the digital edition we, as a group, created. We made the conscious decision to not include our work from Oxygen and Github because we believed that someone who does not understand how that software works would have a hard time understanding what it actually showed. We did use the data given to us from those websites and the activity of tagging in two of the visualization tools, “Google Fusion” and “Extracted Data”. Under the Visualization tab there are six different options to be clicked on. They are: Voyant, Important People, Important Places, Timeline, Google Fusion, and Story Map. All of these tools are used to analyze the same memoir, but they focus on different aspects of the text, or they focus on the same aspect of the text but provide a different analysis.

After we finished our transcription we were able to upload our transcription into a website that reads, analyzes, and produces creative visual representations of the data and patterns that summarize the texts. The most helpful tool that Voyant produced for me was the word cloud. Our word cloud showed me that the words used most frequently in Tippett’s memoir were “Heart”, “Lord”, and “Savior”. Based off of this word cloud without even reading the Memoir one would be able to see that religion played a major role in Tippett’s life, and as we moved forward in our analysis it became clearer and clearer that it indeed did.

The creation of our Timeline provided our group with a visual construction of Tippett’s life in a linear fashion. We understood that chronology is an important discipline in learning how to interpret the past. Before creating this timeline I was under the impression that timelines really only offered a list of facts that occured in chronological order with very little connection. After creating this timeline I had a completely different understanding of how timelines can be interpreted and how time itself works. I realized that timelines can offer a much more in depth analysis of data than I had previously believed possible. The Indian historian Romila Thapar, “long emphasized that genealogy and chronicle are not primitive efforts to write what would become history in other hands, but powerful, graphically dense ways of describing and interpreting the past.” (TIP-13)

After we finished our timelines we worked on creating Google Fusion tables. This exercise allowed us to generate visible relationships between two different entities. We chose to look at the relationship between Person Name and Place Name. Through this activity we were able to see that every person that Tippett mentions throughout his memoir has a connection to religion, further supporting the idea that religion played a role a major role in many people’s lives throughout this time period. Some important people mentioned were Brothers Cennick, Whitefield, and Wesley. Cennick, much like Tippett, was a misbehaved child who found a passion for religion later in life. Cennick witnessed his aunt, on her deathbed, completely at peace because of her relationship to the Lord. Cennick explans, “The words she uttered indeed pierced my soul, so that I could not rest day nor night, but wishing continually after, if I thought of death and sickness, O that I may be assured of heaven before I die!” (JStor-36) Wesley and Whitefield had a more traditional connection to religion. Religion played a major role in both of their early lives and then they both preceded to attend Oxford University where they discovered their passion for preaching. Both individuals were famous for the ability to connect with their audiences, and many even see Wesley as, “the founder of the methodist movement.” (UMC.org)

The final tool we learned to use the StoryMapJS. At first glance it may seem like StoryMapJS is simply a more complicated timeline, but it actually provides a platform to creatively use space as a way of presenting data. Bodenhamer explains, “We are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order our world” (14). In the context of our website, the spaces that we are trying to draw meaning to are cities and villages within the UK. Tippett began his life as a careless troublemaker, but as he grew older and older his perception of the world changed and he dedicated himself to Jesus and began a never ending journey of achieving Jesus’ forgiveness. The StoryMap tracks Tippett travels throughout this Journey.

Looking at the data that we compiled this semester, our group believes that we have proved religion did give Samuel Tippett a new life and most likely provided a similar experience for many other people. Through Voyant we were able to capture a glimpse of how religion centered Tippett’s memoir. The timeline provided us with evidence that every event important enough to be dated was related to religion. Finally both Google Fusion and StoryMapJS allowed us to see that anytime that Tippett changed locations it was with intentions to become more and more religious. Tippett’s life was dominated by religion during a time period coined “The Great Awakening”, so it is not outlandish to believe that many other people had similar experiences. My group looks forward for viewers of our website to make their own conclusions.

Categories
Blog #5 Uncategorized

Visualization

In today’s society space is everywhere. Bodenhamer says, “Here, contemporary notions of space are myriad; what once was a reference primarily to geographical space, with its longstanding categories of landscape and place, is now modified by class, capital, gender, and race, among other concepts, as an intellectual framework for understanding power and society in times near and distant”(14). The idea of space is no longer solely related to an actual physical space between two objects or locations, instead, it is also used as any difference between objects. Look at today’s political climate in America, we have mostly separate the country into two categories Republican or Democrat and we even assign states to be Republican or Democratic. Bodenhamer explains that when looking at boarders, “they are not passive settings but the medium for the development of culture” (16). This is a more generic view of space within America but these histories or categories that are seen as differences can vary from person to person or even country to country.

When viewing a map you are usually looking at locations, but there is always subconscious history attached to each location. For example, when you look at a globe and you see the United States, you might think of the revolutionary war or you might even think of American Football. I am from New Jersey so when I see New Jersey on a map, I instantly think of the summers I have spent on the beach with my friends and family. These personal experiences in New Jersey help me create a separation between New Jersey and other states. Bodenhamer explains, “We are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order our world” (14). So if a map is a way of demonstrating space between locations it is also a way of creating space between history and experiences and this combination allows someone to “understand fundamentally how we order our world.” (14)

I personally found it only partially helpful to map my memoir. I believe that this is the outcome of having a memoir that focused only on one outcome. Samuel Tippett’s ultimate goal is to be forgiven of his sins in the eyes of the lord. This singular goal makes for very similar experiences and levels of importance between locations like Bitton, Bristol, Kingswood, etc. Every place that Tippett visits is related towards his overarching goal of dedicating his life to Jesus. I did however find it very helpful to map out Tippet’s relationships. Tippet is constantly mentioning individuals that impacted his religious path and separating them by locations makes it easier to keep track of who he met where.

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/1a984065ab5cc7db4976aee5782c7b63/samuel-tippett/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″]

Categories
Blog #4

Mark Ups

        My group is transcribing writing from 18th century Moravian culture. If you were to look at my digital transcription and the original hand written document they would look incredibly different. Tanselle explains, “Obviously a transcription cannot exactly reproduce the relative precision of carelessness with which handwritten letters are formed or their relative sizes, or the amount of space between words and lines” (465). This point that no transcription will ever look exactly like the original document is important to keep in mind when observing my group’s specific transcription. My group of four people divided up the pages of Samuel Tippett’s memoir and each transcribed four or five pages. The fact that transcriptions cannot perfectly represent the original document implies that there is a lot of room for discrepancies when transcribing the same text. This means that even though my group is transcribing the same story, the way in which I approached and understood my pages is most likely very different  from the way the approached and understood theirs. Pierazzo further supports this point by explaining, “The process of selection is inevitably an interpretive act: what we choose to represent and what we do not depends either on the particular vision that we have of a particular manuscript or on practical constraints” (465). When we went back to our transcription and began the process of mark ups, it provided us with a way of linking our texts together both logically and stylistically.

        When deciding how we wanted to mark up our transcription the hardest element was keeping everything consistent. Michael Hunter explains, “An electronic edition is like an iceberg, with far more data potentially available than is actually visible on the screen, and this is at the same time a great opportunity and a temptation to overdo things” (467). Having the meeting to go over our guildlines was important to make sure our pages matched. The two hardest elements to keep consistent were deciding how we would mark dates and emotions.  Dates were presented to us in a few different ways. Sometimes we would be given a date saying “In the year 1754”. Other times, it was presented without the word year in front of the date, and the final way included the day and month. Eventually, we decided that in our mark ups of dates we would include months, days, and years (like 1754) and we would leave out the word year or years in the mark up. That was a simple decision, but the decision on how we would mark up emotions was much more complicated. Constantly throughout our memoir, Samuel Tippett used words and phrases like, “love”, “heart have felt”, “something in my heart”. All of these phrases seem as if they are portraying emotion, but we did not decide to tag all of them. We decided that we would only tag words, classified as emotions, which are directly related to Tippet himself. This allowed us to not go crazy in our task to tag emotions.

                

Categories
Blog #3 contextual research

Timelines

Blog 3:

Chronology is an important discipline in learning how to interpret the past. For instance, “Thapar has long emphasized that genealogy and chronicle are not primitive efforts to write what would become history in other hands, but powerful, graphically dense ways of describing and interpreting the past.” (13) Both chronology and genealogy are a way of linking together events in a particular order that produce an outcome. For example, Hayden White brings up the medieval manuscript chronology called the Annals of St. Gall. This chronology covers 25 years of events that occurred in the Frankish Kingdoms. While observing the manuscripts, you will see a list of events that seem to be nothing more than a list of negative incidents that happened to the Frankish Kingdoms, but White explains they, “vividly figure a world of scarcity and violence, a world in which “forces of disorder” occupy they the forefront of attention”. (12) Going further in depth, chronology does not simply have to be a list of events, but instead can be a demonstration of what was important in that time period.

There are some negatives to the visual tool of timelines. Unfortunately, more often than not chronology is presented in a linear fashion. This makes sense because time, itself, is seen as linear. This causes a problem in representing history or even a story like Samuel Tippett’s memoirs because history and stories are not linear. Priestly explains, “historical narrative is not linear.” (20) For example, regarding Samuel Tippett’s life we see a boy who decides to dedicate himself to god, but then not long after, he decides to revert back to his old menacing behavior. This represents events in his life that are clearly not linear so it does not make much sense to represent them in a linear fashion. The combination of methods would be extremely helpful. Both linear representation and matrix form allow the viewer to observe connections of events in different ways but together can provide a broad overarching view of a historical events and a more in-depth analysis of how the events relate to each other. Another disadvantage of a linear timeline would be the perception of importance. The timeline lists events with their dates. This would assume that all events are just as important as each other, but we know from history and stories that all events are not equally as impactful to the outcome, so based on the presentation of the linear chronology, there could be a lack of awareness for the most important events. For these very reasons timelines do not tell the complete story. They tell a story but definitely not the complete one.