As Humanities 100 comes to a conclusion, I have been reflecting on my learning experience throughout the class. When I originally enrolled in this course, I did not know what my clear expectations were. Perhaps, a course with a lot of writing considering it is a W2 credit. However, on the first day I was astounded to how different it was from other classes I have taken in the past. As a junior, I have taken a variety of courses in many subject fields composed of professors each with their own teaching style. This class was truly unique from any other class I have taken at Bucknell University and I commend both the Humanities department as well as Professor Faull for opening this window of opportunity and learning to me.
Before this class, I had only knew one way to read any sort of text. I was taught how to read at a young age and as I grew older, I learned how to skim for what is important as well as annotate and analyze text depending on what subject and the purpose. In this class, I learned how useful transcriptions are, especially in artifacts dating back hundreds of years. Transcriptions are the most in depth analysis I have ever done. After several projects and assignments, I fully understand the memoir and felt like an expert! My group members and I were assigned Samuel Tippett’s memoir. My group consisted of Alison, Clayton, and Bhagawat. We were assigned a group in the initial first few weeks of class. Together we worked on Samuel Tippett’s memoir in various projects using completely new tools to me. Before this class, I had never used ‘Bucknell Blogs’ so posting our first assignment on the website in the form of a blog post was pretty cool to me.
Following this, we all broke up sections of the original document and allocated who was transcribing each page. This process consisted of reading the original text and depicting what it said. Sometimes it was difficult since the photographs were old, handwriting could have been a bit messy and also some words did not translate into modern day English language. It was helpful to have a group member reread and edit my transcriptions to make sure they were correct as this was crucial to the rest of our projects during the semester. The next tool we used was Voyant. Through Voyant, we were able to learn about the text in many ways. There were several charts, graphs, and lists of the key words in the text. Some examples include Cirrus, Trends, Knots, and Mandela which we included in our website. To go into detail about one, the Cirrus tool is my favorite. It shows a collaboration of the tools with the most used and important words as the largest with bright colors. Our other projects were the timeline as well as story map. The timeline helped organize events in chronological order. It gave readers, visitors to our timeline, as well as us a better understanding and visual of his life through our descriptions and photographs. Personally, it is always easier to me to understand a text when I can “put a face to the name”. Our story map was similar to the timeline with descriptions and photographs. An added element to the story map is that it showed the places on a map where he traveled throughout his lifetime. As one views the story map, it shows Samuel Tippett’s journey. The next tool we used was extracting data through Google Fusion tables. By putting words into a spreadsheet, my group members and I were able to identify the most important relationships. In our specific memoir, person name to place name was most prominent. However, in other memoirs people also had emotion as an important part of the relationship. Samuel Tippett’s emotions mostly stayed relatively the same until he devoted his life to God. This was the shift from negative to positive well being and overall happiness.
As I said earlier, through the many projects we have done it contributed a great deal to my overall understanding of the memoir. The included readings also helped me understand each project a bit more as well and I liked how each blog post coincided with a reading. My favorite reading was Grafton’s “Cartographies of Time”. I really enjoyed and appreciated how it linked with our project. In this article, he describes the history of timelines themselves. This was eye opening for me because of how progressive and technology based our world is today. I had never given a second thought to not knowing the time of certain dates or events. It makes me appreciate all of the advances the world has made and it reminds me of the common phrase, “time is of the essence”. Which is immediate satisfaction and gratification for something to be completed which is prevalent in our modern world today. Also, Drucker’s article gave light to the fact that these tools were not always available to us. “Almost all of the formats used in visualization or information graphics have venerable histories.” (64) This realization made me appreciate these tools even more than before.
For this project, my group members and I did a bit more research on Moravian Lives to give our website the best possible design and the viewer an in depth understanding of Samuel Tippet’s life. On Jstor, we read “The Theology of John Cennick” which was an important character in Samuel Tippett’s life as well as the Great Awakening time period. I learned about Cennick’s lineage as well such as his grandparents and their involvement in the church, which is included in more detail on our website. Cennick had also had a realization to devote his life to God similar to Tippett’s. This movement began in the 1730s and was “the idea of secular rationalism being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale.” (History) This time period was also the time of the “Enlightenment” or age of reason. With this background knowledge, it was evident how important religion was to not only Samuel Tippett’s but the time period as a whole.
The design of our website was constructed by all of my group members and I. The homepage gives a brief introduction to what our website and memoir is about. There are several tabs that have a few subtabs. The tabs include digital edition, visualization, sources and about us. The digital edition tab has the original text and transcribed text included. The visualization tab homepage describes how the tools we used helped us in this process. Under this tab includes each of our projects as well as some of the important people and places. The sources include the readings that we used as well as a few citations. Finally, the about us section is a short description of each of us.
In conclusion, the website was a great way to wrap up all of the projects we had completed this semester. With these projects over the course of the semester, there were challenges but doing it in a group setting really helped me. These challenges came about for me because this was all very new. I’m not super “tech savy” . The first challenge that I encountered in this class was definitely trying to read and transcribe the original document. I was very overwhelmed at first and had no idea how I was going to be able to do it. It tied them all together and was a final chance to collaborate with each other’s group members. For my group, we found it most efficient to assign each other certain parts and edit each other’s to ensure we did the best we could. This class was a lot of ‘firsts’ for me, and I loved the experience!
https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/great-awakening
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41179343?seq=7#metadata_info_tab_contents
Here is our website attached:
http://tippetthumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu
Morgan Graning is a junior at Bucknell University. She is a political science major and sociology minor. Morgan is from Long Island, New York.
The process of marking up my transcription has affected my understanding of the text. Throughout this process, I have read my text (Samuel Tippet) many different times in many different ways\forms. The original reading was reading it online through the original document which was a bit difficult to decipher. Next, I read while transcribing what the document had said. After this, I had to proofread what I had transcribed as well as my other group members to make sure it had made sense with no errors. This is when I read the whole story and it all came together. Next, with creating the timeline it pointed out the “landmark” events in Samuel Tippet’s life such as where he was born, marriage, and more. Tagging things such as a person, place, and emotion pointed out the most important people to my group members and I. It pointed out what people were mentioned the most, the most popular places as well as what emotions he was feeling throughout his memoir which were mostly negative unfortunately. He was a sad man that turned to God in order to help him throughout his life journey.
