Author: Hailey Zimmerman

Hailey Zimmerman is a sophomore finance major at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. She is from Darien, CT.

Categories
final blog

Final Blog

Link to our Website: http://leeshumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian Church, implemented the concept of having each Moravian write their own life story, which is something that I found very unique. He started the church because he wanted to create a community that stressed the importance of the individual and the individual’s role within the community. Zinzendorf wanted to be able to preserve the evolution of the Moravian Church so he established the concept of having every single Moravian write a memoir of their life because he felt each individual contributed to the identity of the Moravian Church. He believed that each individual had a unique experience and relationship with the congregation and with God, so he wanted the many different perspectives to be noticed.  We decided to focus on the question: does a single life matter? All semester long, we have focused on the Moravians and have learned more about them, their lives, and their beliefs.

In order to answer our question, we demonstrated the many different pieces of information that we learned about society, history, geography, people, etc just from the text in her memoir.

First, we utilized Voyant which highlighted the key terms in the memoir of Harriett Lees giving us insight on what her life was like and what was important to her. I learned that the Harriett Lees Memoir has 2,099 total words and 731 unique word forms. I find this very interesting because a high percentage of words used were not used more than once showing me that Lees was well-versed and most likely well-educated. Each sentence averaged about 80.7 words, which is also very high and affirms the idea of Lees being educated as a high average sentence length symbolizes a high education level. We then took this a step further and looked at how women were treated in England in the past and how that would have contributed to Harriet Lees’ high education level. Voyant allowed me to partake in distant reading, a concept from the Whitley reading. Instead of closely reading each word of the memoir, I looked at the patterns that emerged and then thought about how this was applicable on a larger scale. The visualizations I made from Voyant also allowed me to practice spatial reading, another concept from the Whitley reading. Spatial reading is transforming text into forms that takes advantage of visual perception instead of just using typical sequential reading. It uses patterns and creates “concept shapes.”

[iframe style=’width: 717px; height: 226px;’ src=’//voyant-tools.org/tool/Summary/?corpus=6116233b28b7b9aede5cfd3dfd08f2a2′][/iframe]

After, we then took the important dates in Harriet Lees’ life discussed in the memoir and plotted them on a timeline. Chronology allows us to see patterns and identify relationships between different events which is vital in both learning and decision making. We can represent history both with chronology and geography which is what is encompassed in the timeline that Paige and I created. Even though “historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored” in the past and it may seem simple at first, a timeline can tell us an abundant amount about the past because it utilizes both chronology and geography which are essential in representing history (Grafton 10). We then had to do research to get a better context as to what was going on in Leominster, where she lived, and the surrounding areas during the time she was alive. By looking at where she lived and important events happening there during the early nineteenth century, we were utilizing the geographic mode of representation. We then found that the Industrial Revolution, Bath Houses, and the tuberculosis outbreak were big events going on during the time period in which Harriet Lees was alive. After putting those events into the timeline,  we immediately saw the correlation because we  were able to use the chronological mode of representation. We saw how the events going on in Great Britain at the time intertwined with the struggles that Harriet Lees faced throughout her life.

The timeline was instrumental in helping us understand and discover why Harriet Lees went to Leamington Spa. We learned that in nineteenth century Great Britain, heath spas were seen as healthy places to visit and stay and it was believed that the waters there served medicinal purposes. Health was promoted by the introduction of spa waters, doctors, and parks and gardens (Royal Leamington Spa). Harriett Lees struggled with lung disease and was recommended to try the special water Leamington Spa offered. She went in the summer of 1937 and it helped her regain some strength and health, but she was still very weak.

Next, we created a map by plotting important places that Harriet Lees lived in or traveled to during her life. The map provided a spatial representation of a narrative because it was telling the story of one particular person. Specifically mapping Harriet Lees’ memoir has demonstrated how Harriet Lees spent the majority of her life and how she made her journey to Leamington in attempt to improve her health. Furthermore, through the Moravian Lives website and creating my map, I was able to see where other Moravians, specifically women, at the time lived. I was able to get a better understanding about Harriet Lees because I discovered what Moravian women at the time did and what their purpose in the church was. I saw how important historical events that occurred in Great Britain during the course of Harriet Lees’ life, affected where Moravians, specifically Harriet Lees lived. Even though London was the central hub for Moravians in the past, during 1811-1842 (the years Harriet Lees was alive for) the greatest number of Moravian women, whose information was in the archives, lived in Bristol and not London. I realized that this was because Bristol was a huge port on the slave trade, so there was a booming economy there. Bristol is much closer to where Harriet Lees lived, so it is very possible that she interacted with the members of the Congregation in Bristol. This directly relates to Bodenhamer’s point that “spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product and determinant of change” (Bodenhamer 16).

Another thing that we felt was important was that Harriet Lees was brought up in a family of individuals devoted to the Church of England, but she ended up getting married and became a member of the Moravian Church. After realizing how dramatic this change was, we decided to do further research into the relationship between the two churches and how the relationship would of been relevant to Harriet Lees’ life.

This is a screenshot of one of the pages on our website!

To convey this information on our website, we created a menu that listed the numerous aspects of Harriet Lees’ life that we further researched. On each of the pages, we explained our findings and how they related to Harriet Lees. We utilized contextual research, pictures, and the projects we created using the text from the memoir on each page to both verbally and visually explain all that we learned from Harriet Lees’ memoir. We made a page for each of the following: Gender History, the History of the Moravian Church, Moravian Women, and Tuberculosis in England. Each page consisted of our research, pictures that we felt would enhance our findings, and embedded links to the programs we used to help us obtain the information embedded in the memoir. We then created a page discussing the basis of our research question and explained why we feel that a single story is in fact very significant. In this section we discussed how we found so much about society, England, women, religion etc. just from looking at her memoir. We also made a page where we summarized the memoir so that readers will understand the original text we used as the basis of our research.

A problem we faced was that we simply did not have access to enough information to go as in depth. It was very difficult for us to find the memoirs of Moravian women in England during the lifespan of Harriet Lees. We thought that if we were able to learn about first hand experiences from other individuals, we would be able to get a better sense of the Moravians as a whole. By comparing numerous memoirs, we would also get a better sense of how significant each one was and if the information between them would be consistent. However, we were able to overcome this problem by utilizing Professor Faull’s book which gave us much more information on specific Moravian women in England. We also were able to conduct research on this topic and learned that during the “mid-1820s the sisters were involved in burgeoning array of organized charitable activities, including the funding of a seamen’s mission in Bristol, a Bible society, and missions ‘for the Heatheren’” (Dresser 313). We realized that these were the same activities Harriet Lees engaged in when she was a member of the Moravian Church.

This is a picture of Professor Faull’s book that was very beneficial to us when we were conducting our research. Prior to using this text, we felt we did not have enough data to answer our question, but were able to get enough information from this.

Another page that we created on our website consists of all the work with the memoir and research that we conducted throughout the entire semester. We listed each program we used and how we analyzed the memoir using that program. Then, we provided a link to the actual research we conducted using that platform so that the readers of our blog have an even better understanding of the process we utilized to come to our conclusions.

We strongly feel that an individual’s personal story is extremely significant because there is so much information embedded into it. We were able to learn so much about society, world history, and the history of groups of people just from learning about one individua’ls perspective. We agree with Zinzendorf and see the value that an individual’s perspective is extremely important when looking a community because everyone has a different role and sees things differently.

Now that the semester is over and our website is complete, I am amazed as to how much we learned from Harriet Lees’ memoir. Not only did I learn about Harriet Lees and the Moravians, but I learned how to analyze any text I may read from numerous different perspectives. Digital Humanities taught me that there is so much more to a piece of text than just the text itself. There are so many pieces of information embedded within each word and each combination of a word that can tell a story. Going forward, I now know I have the tools to understand any pieces of information and I recognize the value of digital editions and digital archives.

Categories
Blog #5

Blog #5: Visualization

A map is a diagram of collection of data showing the spatial distribution of something and the relative positions of its components. There is a tremendous amount of data embedded into maps that can be accessed by analyzing them.  As mentioned in the Bodenhamer reading, “we are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order our world to work” (Bodenhamer 14). Where a particular feature on a map is positioned matters. Its position and relationship to other features demonstrates what it important. I was able to utilize the spatial distance between points on the map to gain more information.

The map I created provided a spatial representation of a narrative because it was telling the story of one particular person. Specifically mapping Harriet Lees’ memoir has demonstrated how Harriet Lees spent the majority of her life and how she made her journey to Leamington in attempt to improve her health. Furthermore, through the Moravian Lives website and creating my map, I was able to see where other Moravians, specifically women, at the time lived. I was able to get a better understanding about Harriet Lees because I discovered what Moravian women at the time did and what their purpose in the church was. Furthermore, I was able to see how important historical events that occurred in Great Britain during the course of Harriet Lees’ life, affected where Moravians, specifically Harriet Lees lived. Even though London was the central hub for Moravians in the past, during 1811-1842 (the years Harriet Lees was alive for) the greatest number of Moravian women, whose information was in the archives, lived in Bristol and not London. I realized that this was because Bristol was a huge port on the slave trade, so there was a booming economy there. Bristol is much closer to where Harriet Lees lived, so it is very possible that she interacted with the members of the Congregation in Bristol. This directly relates to Bodenhamer’s point that “spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product and determinant of change” (Bodenhamer 16). Because of events occurring at the time, the central location for Moravians changed because they followed the thriving economy. Mapping Harriet Lees’ life taught me more about the life of a Moravian woman at the time. The places I mapped were Woodford cum Membris, The Moravian Church in Leominster, The Moravian Church in Bristol, female Moravians in Bristol during Harriet Lees’ life, Moravian women who were in Leominster at some point during Harriet Lees’ life, and The Leamington Spa in Leamington. The specific locations plotted on the map proved my past opinion that religion was extremely important to Harriet Lees as the majority of the places plotted were churches. The spatial difference between Leominster and Woodford Cum Membris reflects not only a physical movement, but represents the change in her religion.  I was also able to gain a better understanding of events and situations that Harriet Lees may have faced throughout her life. As mentioned in the Bodenhamer reading, “human activity is about space and time” and creating the map on Storymap.js “provided a way to manage, relate, and query events, as well as to visualize them” (Bodenhamer 22). Through the map, I was able to track Harriet Lees’ activity and understand more about her.

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/ed09ff7b72d83b28d703a06b246fc922/harriet-lees/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

Categories
Blog #4

Blog #4: Extracting Entities

The process of marking up my transcription has bettered my understanding of Harriet Lee’s memoir because I feel I now comprehend the information that is embedded in our memoir. We already practiced distant reading, where I was able to get a broad overview of the text, so after marking it up and using TEI (very close reading), I was able to see the small details as well as the big picture. This combination of distant and close reading is called differential reading, which really helped me understand the text that I have been working with. I was able to come up  with my own interpretation of the text, which I recognize would be different from any other individual because “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar (Pierazzo 465). The richness of the mark-up of text shows intellectual engagement. This is due to the fact that the extent of how an author marks up a text reflects how we interpreted what the author is saying. Each person has their own, unique interpretation and their own judgments and thoughts, which is demonstrated through the richness of textual mark-up. We worked to create a diplomatic edition, “a published version of a transcription
which reproduces as many of the characteristics of the original document as the medium permits or as the project requires” (Pierazzo 473).

Collaborating with Paige as an editorial board has changed my understanding of how edited texts are produce. In fact, my opinion on the entire editorial process has changed. There were so many little, but critical decisions we had to make when deciding what to mark-up.  As discussed in “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” by Elena Pierazzo, “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative 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” (Pierazzo 465). I did not even consider this prior to this module. In order for us to have well-versed and consistent mark-ups, we were in constant conversation with one another. We would frequently ask each other questions on what specifically to tag something as, so that our work remained homogeneous and would provide us with a more accurate result in the end. We discussed the words/phrases that we were unsure about and compiled a list of our decisions on a Google Document, so we could refer back if the problem arose again. When knew discrepancies came up, we would decide how to tag something based off the precedent of our past decisions.

We decided not to tag “Saviour,” “Lord,” or “Holy Spirit” as a person because we decided that we would only tag concrete things and there is some skepticism revolving around religious figures. Likewise, we decided not to tag “heaven” as a place because it is not tangible. We also decided not to tag words like “sister,” “brother,” or “doctor” as they are too general and do not refer to a specific person. In certain contexts when it was not “she went to church” (a place), we treated it as an organization because it was referring to a group of people who share the same beliefs. By doing this, we tried to remain as objective as possible. ‘Thus we may conclude
that there is such a thing as objectivity of interpretation:
the vast majority of decisions

Prior to this module, I did not realize how tedious editing digital texts can be. I learned that it was very important for Paige and I to properly save our files and edit in the proper documents to ensure that we were both working in the most up-to-date version and did not lose any valuable changes.

Categories
Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3: Timelines

I believe that chronology of events is extremely important because it allows us to see cause and effect. We would not be able to know and understand the outcome of any given event if we were not given the timing. There would be know way to learn from past mistakes or make changes in the future if  we were not given the chronology of events. As mentioned in Grafton’s introduction, timelines allow us to compare “individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years” in a manner where we can see the connections and development (Grafton 15). Chronology allows us to see patterns and identify relationships between different events which is vital in both learning and decision making. We can represent history both with chronology and geography which is what is encompassed in the timeline that Paige and I created. Even though “historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored” in the past and it may seem simple at first, a timeline can tell us an abundant amount about the past because it utilizes both chronology and geography which are essential in representing history (Grafton 10).

In order to create a timeline of Harriet Lees’ life,  Paige and I extracted key dates out of her memoir and placed them onto the timeline. We then had to do research to get a better context as to what was going on in Leominster, where she lived, and the surrounding areas during the time she was alive. By looking at where she lived and important events happening there during the early nineteenth century, we were utilizing the geographic mode of representation. We then found that the Industrial Revolution, Bath Houses, and the tuberculosis outbreak were big events going on during the time period in which Harriet Lees was alive. After putting those events into the timeline,  we immediately saw the correlation because we were able to use the chronological mode of representation. We saw how the events going on in Great Britain at the time intertwined with the struggles that Harriet Lees faced throughout her life. We would never have been able to draw these connections and conclusions without plotting this information on a timeline.

For example, we knew that Harriet Lees suffered from lung inflammation and was constantly ill, but we did not realize that her illness was a part of the larger tuberculosis outbreak that was going on in Great Britain.

I am now able to have a better understanding of the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation because I was able to visually see the cause and effect of events by each event’s location on the timeline and I could visually understand what the context of each event was from the pictures with the assistance of a short description. Putting this timeline together made me realize that a line, not just chronology can tell a story. The pictures and descriptions made what was just chronology come to life. The timeline we made models after chronographics which Grafton discussed in his introduction. However, I feel the layout of our timeline addresses the problem that chronographics had in the seventeenth century, “how to simplify, how to create a visual scheme to clearly communicate the uniformity, directionality, and irreversibility of historical time” (Grafton 19). Our timeline includes the visualizations; however, it does not lose site of the sequence of events.

 

[iframe src=’https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=13LSz87T6SWQHJEAbTZE6ZBNhhtDZGD5hMGe6mzC-SSY&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650′ width=’100%’ height=’650′ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen frameborder=’0′></iframe]