Author: Jacob Hubbard

Jacob Hubbard is a sophomore at Bucknell University, and is from San Francisco, CA.

Categories
Blog #2

Blog 2

For my first time transcribing a memoir, my group and I transcribes a memoir written by the kids of a man named John Wiley.  The memoir is written after the death John Wiley in order to remember in his life. It first starts off by introducing John Wiley and  his family stating that his mother died when he was very young, his father was a member in the congregation for 66 years, he had a brother that was also a member of multiple congregations, and then he also had his sister.  The memoir then describes his early life being a favorite of his teachers, but when moving to the city to start a career he also started to enjoy life and, “sinful pleasure” (3). Around the age of 15 he did not want anything to do with God.  He soon went to London and that is when he decided that he needed to change the way he was living and turn to God. He became a laborer at the Kingwood congregation and started to teach the children there. Shortly after being welcomed into the congregation as a laborer he had his first communion and was visited with a vision of Jesus Christ.  John Wiley devoted himself more to the Church at this time but also started to face hardships with his health. After teaching at the Kingwood Congregation he then was a teacher in Mirfield for several years and then also started to preach the gospel. After several more years of preaching he finally became ordained, but his health was quickly deteriorating.  John Wiley died still proclaiming his devotion to the Lord.

After reading the memoir it is hard not to ask myself, “What were the other family members doing at this time, and what were they feeling?”.  This is written by the children of John Wiley and they seem to be okay with his death since he will be closer to God whom John Wiley devoted much of his life too.  The children writing this memoir do not seem as if they are grieving his death but more celebrating his life. There are also some holes in the story, and I feel like there are parts missing when talking about his mental state.  In no instance do they talk about how worried they were, they always seemed to be positive throughout his whole life.

 

When looking at the document through voyant it helps organize keywords through visual images and much more.  In the John Wiley memoir the 5 most common words are years, time, great, lord, and life.  Lord and life appears a good amount in the memoir since it is about John Wiley’s life and religion played a big part of it.  When talking about time, it referred to time he spent in different places, and years referred to the same thing and also ages of people.  The word great was connected to various sentences and there was no clear pattern.

Above is a visual tool on voyant that allows the viewer to see the most frequent words.  When you put your mouse over one of the words it also highlights other words it is connected to in the document.

Above is the visual tool called “Cirrus” and it again highlights the keywords in the document in a visual image that would be able to be shown to anyone.

Above is a visual tool called “knots” and it has a line for a certain keyword, and every time the word is used the line bends a little bit making a knot.

Categories
Assignment #1

Assignment #1

Working with these old memoirs from the Moravian lives projects was very interesting and surprisingly fun.  Being able to read something that was written so long ago was something I have never done, and it was really engaging.  As I read about John Wiley’s life, I was able to imagine his life and almost grow attached to what I was writing down and feel like what I was doing was really important.  Even though reading the piece was engaging and interesting, it presented some challenges. To be able to create a digital text, we had to be able to read what the document said and write down exactly what was written, even if the punctuation or spelling was wrong.  The words were faded and the way that people wrote in the past was a lot different from how people write today. From the way they wrote cursive the their word choice, it was hard to be able to read it at times. Letters like F, T and L were sometimes hard to distinguish, as well as two words close together without a space.  Also, words were misspelled which presented a whole new challenge. We had to type out the misspelling and then correct it, but at times the misspelling was hard to make out what word they were trying to say. Luckily for the John Wiley memoirs, the archivist that had the documents were able to send our group clearer images of the original copies which was a game changer for being able to transcribe.  The help of the professors and also the students that came in to help us was also monumental for being able to transcribe, because their eyes have been trained to read these old documents. We then had to tag different parts of the text and point out a person’s name, dates, places, misspellings, and other things of that nature.

John Wiley Memoir

Categories
Blog #1

Blog #1

There are lots of advantages to to create digital artifacts from archival documents. For example, physical documents are fragile, and are at risk at being destroyed and therefore the information they possess is lost.  Documents from hundreds of years ago allow us to see what the world was like in the past, but these old documents are usually worn down and sometimes illegible when they are found. By transcribing these documents into a digital archive, it preserves the information.  Digital archives also allow historical information to be easily accessible to the average person. The physical documents are held in an archive, and demands one to travel to the archive and for some important documents you must meet certain credentials to be able to see it.  Digital archives can be accessed in the convenience of one’s home as long as they have a computer. While there are many advantages, creating a digital archive there are also disadvantages. In order to transcribe archival documents into digital artifacts, a great amount of time is needed.  Creating a digital archive also means that people need to be able to create and maintain the website, and also demands committed people that are willing to transcribe documents accurately.

The Moravian Lives project shared similarities with lots of other large-scale DH projects.  The Moravian Lives project looks to preserve first hand accounts of Moravian people that moved from Germany to Pennsylvania.  The Moravian people kept journals that they used to write about their daily lives, and also sent letters describing their lives.  These documents contain valuable information about what the world was like back then. History is dominated by the male point of view, since usually they were the ones that would write and were more educated but the Moravian Lives project has valuable first hand accounts from women as well.  This is rare, as women and other minority groups do not have a big voice in history. Archive projects like “Old Weather” and “Database of Indigenous Peoples in North America” have a similar mission as the Moravian Lives project. All three look to keep information about the past and preserve it, and make it accessible to people.  They all three also involve transcribing documents that were written hundreds of years ago. The Moravian Lives project is also similar to “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project. The “Mapping the Republic of Letters” projects maps out where letters were sent from people like Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, to illustrate how far their letters traveled.  The Moravian Lives project site also has a similar feature which shows where letters are from and where they traveled to.

With the current state of technology, I think society is more inclined to use screens for textual material instead of the physical printed version of books.  This also means that when studying or doing research, physically going to the library is starting to become more rare. This is why digital archives are important.  Digital versions of the text can either be a direct picture of the document and also just be the text on the document. Actually being able to see the original document over the computer in picture form can be more revealing for someone compared to if they were just reading a new version of the document.  

Categories
Practice Blog

Practice

One DH project I found interesting was called, “Old Weather”. Its primary Digital Humanities focus was to preserve and archive information from old logbooks of whalers and Arctic voyagers in order to understand the weather of the past.  It also had a secondary approach and also involved textual analysis. Once pages of old logbooks were archived, they were then transcribed. These two methods to organize the information fit the scholarly subject well, because the pages from logbooks are easy to find and the transcriptions make it easier to understand what we are looking at.  Since some of the pages date back to the mid-19th century, they do need to be preserved and archived in order to save the information, especially since they are written on paper. Transcription and textual analysis are also necessary in order to understand what is actually written down since some pages can be too hard to read in their current state.  

 

Another DH project is called, “Mapping the Republic of Letters”. This project is a network analysis project that aims to map out how communication by letter had changed throughout history. The project looks at people from Voltaire and Galileo, to the Spanish empire, and works to show how large their network of communication was. It also used visualization to show how how many letters were sent by a particular person, and graphs to show where the letters went to geographically, and who they were received by.  The graphs and images are really helpful to show just how far publications traveled, or to show how limited people in the past where to spreading their works. Since the information the project was looking at were letters that had to travel to other places, the visualization approach does a great job at communicated the difference between communication today and the past.