Author: Morgan Graning

Morgan Graning is a junior at Bucknell University. She is a political science major and sociology minor. Morgan is from Long Island, New York.

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Blog #2

After transcribing Samuel Tippet’s piece with my group members, we came up with a research question that we felt was appropriate. Our research question was:

How does religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription?

Tippet’s piece begins with him describing himself. He was born in 1711 in the Parish of Bitton. He also describes his family life and his challenges. His father had died when he was very young, and he turned to God during this period of hardship. Personally, I think he is a little troubled and very dark because several times throughout the pieces he “wishes he was never born” and questions himself what life would be like without him. He criticizes, and self scrutinizes himself and all of the mistakes that he has made throughout his life. Throughout the piece, he describes how he turns to God because of the mistakes he had made in his earlier life.

By asking ourselves this question, it helps the reader or transcriber understand the piece more and analyze it better. When comparing our piece (Samuel Tippet) to another piece, the research question also came into play. The research question also applied to the Esther Latrobe’s memoir.

When using Voyant, each memoir’s key terms comes up. For our piece, the key terms were heart, times, time, poor, and love. For the Esther Latrobe memoir, the key terms were lord, dear, god, let and savior which is why our research question on religion pertains to their piece as well. The combined key terms for the pieces are Lord, heart, time, dear, and oh. Using Voyant, there are many tools available that help you decipher and analyzed a piece. For our piece (Samuel Tippet), it is much shorter than the Latrobe Memoir. Samuel Tippet’s piece had a little around 4,000 words (3,806 words to be exact). In our piece, there was almost no punctuation which made the words/sentence equal to 1,268. The Latrobe’s statistics are more accurate because of the use of punctuation. It was a much longer piece with 8,460 words. The words\sentence was 24.6 which seems to make a lot more sense. Using some of the tools such as terms berry, it tells the Voyant user that the word ‘God’ was used 26 times in the Latrobe memoir. Using the bubble tool, the key words that are most frequently used are the ones with biggest bubbles which makes it easy to tell and visualize instead of just reading terms off of a list. Personally, I like the visualization tools the most because it helps me understand recognize the key terms in a piece better. Other tools such as ‘Grid Tools’ seem very standard to me and have the terms in a chart. Attached, I included a few photos of the tools I used with Voyant.

 

 

 

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Assignment #1

The understanding of how the transcription of a material document affects the researcher’s connection with that document. In my personal experience, transcribing the Moravian Lives piece in specifics the Samuel Tippet piece it was something that I had never done before. I have never completed a project similar to this one which is why I genuinely enjoyed doing so. It was interesting to me reading the work that the people of the Moravian Church had written. My group’s piece in particular was very religious and I’m assuming that this aspect was similar to a lot of the other groups’ works. I had never learned about these people before and it was intriguing to learn about them by reading their work and transcribing. It affects my understanding because it was almost like I was reading their journal or diary; it was a collection of their thoughts and at times it was super personal. There were also a few times because there were a few discrepancies within the text. Sometimes it was difficult to read and also there were misspellings. Perhaps this is how they spelled it at this certain time period, or just human error.

The process of digital text creation for my group started with dividing up who would transcribe what pages. After, we began to ‘decode’ in my mind. I would read the page and try to understand it best I could and later transcribe it. I would normally bold words I was unsure about or place a ‘?’ if I had no idea and check with my group partners after finishing the full page. I would tag people and places after I finished transcribing the page because I found it easier to do since the page told a little story and I started to pick up on words that were used often such as brother. I learned that this word needed to be tagged and was being used in a religious manner. After finishing all of my assigned pages, my group members double checked to make sure that all of our pages were both correctly transcribed and tagged. I felt that I had a connection to the documents because of how personal they were. For example, in some of the pages I transcribed the author spoke about their heart breaking and several emotions such as sadness and despair. I felt like I knew the character because of how deeply they were speaking and because I was rewriting their own words which no one had done before. The links to the original piece as well as my group’s transcribe piece are below.

 

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

Transcribed Works Main Link: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My Work: (Pgs. 7,8,10,15): http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000757

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000758

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000760

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000765

 

 

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Blog #1

After visiting several websites based on archival materials, I realized that there are both advantages and disadvantages to creating a digital artifact. One advantage to creating a digital artifact is the fact that it is progressive. At this day in age, technology is increasingly growing and becoming more and more important to our daily lives in many respected aspects. Physical and tangible manuscripts are going ‘out of style’ because there are so many virtual tools. Another advantage is that with technology comes increased productivity and speed.

According to Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts “many of the Austen manuscripts are frail; open and sustained access has long been impossible for conservation and location reasons.” Another line that stuck out to me as an advantage was “digitization at this stage in their lives not only offers the opportunity for the virtual reunification of a key manuscript resource…” What a lot of the projects have in common are that they are a collection of a bunch of manuscripts. Also, the artifacts are usually kept in an important library or museum.

Some of the disadvantages to creating a digital artifact is that it is digital. To some people, they do not like change (change being the technology in this case). Technology can be extremely helpful but also has its cons. It is expensive, takes time to learn how to figure it out, and can have bugs and crash especially when first starting up. Another huge disadvantage in my opinion is getting rid of the tangible aspect of an artifact. For example, there is no more “flipping the page”.

Are our physical and emotional relationships to our objects of study shifting in a digital age?

I think that our physical and emotional relationships to our object are both changing and staying the same. An emotional attachment and relationship to an object in my opinion does not change just because technology comes into play. However, our physical relationship with an object does change because of the tangible aspect of it going away. Reading on a screen is much different then reading off a physical object.

Do digitized materials supplant our need to view the physical originals, or enhance the necessity of and desire for archival work?

Digitized materials enhance the necessity and desire for archival work. With new technology, there is new publicity, and this is how word spreads which may create a higher desire for archival work.

Are we interacting with textual material on the screen more than on the (manuscript or printed) page, and if so, how are our research practices changing?

I think that we are interacting with textual material on the screen more than a manuscript or a printed page because a lot of the manuscripts are very old and hard to read because of the damage done to them just naturally weathering over the years. With technology becoming a bigger part of our life, it is easier to interact with the textual material as a lot of educational tools and even work-related items are online.

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Morgan Graning’s Practice Post 8\28

I chose visualization and textual analysis as my two sample projects of DH. As Micki Kaufman described her project, “…it is an application of ‘big data’ computational text analysis to research the Digital National Security Archive.” Specifically, Professor Faull’s project was based on metaphorical thought and expression in the history of English. Another project by Professor Faull involving textual analysis is “The Great Parchment Book”. It was a major survey done in 1639. The purpose of textual analysis is to “decode” and gather information about the text given. Specifically, to “The Great Parchment Book” project, it was a manuscript that served as the City of London but unfortunately went through a fire. It is currently in London’s collections at the Metropolitan Archives. With text analysis, researchers can discover what the actual text might say. The method fits with this project because it serves the city as an important artifact containing a lot of information. For visualization, I usually think of pictures and photographs and what they represent. One of the projects that coinsides for textual analysis and visualization is Poemage. This project mainly focuses on poems. “Sonic toponology is the complex structures formed via the interaction of sonic patterns-words connected through some sonic or linguistic resemblance-across the space of the poem.” It was developed at the University of Utah and is a collaboration between visualization experts and poets. Another similar project having to do with visualization is the “Belfast Group Poetry” project. The main purpose of the visualization aspect of Digital Humanities is connecting pictures such as the various charts and graphs given to word and textual references. I decided to focus on these two methods because I felt that they went hand in hand. The visualization method fits well with these two projects because the projects have both photographs and text (poems) which later can be translated into textual analysis.