Author: Megan Koczur

Megan Koczur is a sophomore student at Bucknell University. She is a member of the Bucknell Swim and Dive team and intends on majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. She resides in West Chester, Pennsylvania with her her father, mother, sister, Erin, and two black labs, Brandy and Max.

Categories
final blog

Final Blog

After finalizing our transcriptions and analyzing them, we were able to create a website using WordPress. WordPress allows us to choose a theme for our specific website. We can then add different tabs for each part of our project. The different sections of our project consist of: about, memoir, Moravian women, storymap, timeline, and visualizations. In the about tab, each one of the authors added a short biography of themselves.

A short summary of Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir was provided in the tab labeled memoir. The next tab, Moravian Women, provides viewers with an analysis of Professor Faull’s book, Moravian Women’s Memoirs. In this book, many of the women speak of the struggle they encountered when choosing between family and religion. One of our group members analyzed the difference between single women and married women in regards to which they prioritize, family or faith. After researching the topic, we were able to find answers to support our research question, were there different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church in Moravian Lives? It was determined that single women tended to devote their entire life to religion whereas married women were able to find a balance between the two. Those who did not have a significant other had their life revolve around their Savior after joining the Congregation. For the married woman that was researched, her husband was a part of the Brethren Society. With this, he family life and religious life overlapped a bit; it was easier for her to focus on faith at some times in her life and family at others. This showed that there were, in fact, definitely differences in relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church in Moravian Lives. From our research, it showed that it tended to depend on one’s marital status, and if they were married, who they were married to.

Storymap JS was used to map out different places in Elizabeth Grundy’s life and connect these places to each other. We were able to see where the important events in her life occurred and find relationships between them. We could determine where her important religious events took place as well as her familial events and see if they occurred in the same places or ones that were close to another. We were able to see if she had to drop everything to travel far for something else or if things were connected.

There were several different visualization techniques used when analyzing our transcription and determining the answer to our research question. “A digital edition can represent many more features than a print publication can,” (Pierazzo 472). Pierazzo speaks of the many benefits of using a digital edition over a print one. The visualizations tab on our website contains many subsections: Moravian Lives, Oxygen, TEI File, WordPress, Voyant, and Google Fusion.  Moravian Lives was the tool we used when first transcribing our memoir and gave us our first glimpse into the amount of times she spoke of her family and the amount of times she spoke of religion. It was very easy to realize, after reading through the memoir once, that these two things were incredibly important in her life, and her entire life revolved around them both.

Oxygen allowed us to create tags on specific words that we felt were important in analyzing the memoir. Our markups were recorded in a TEI file. This allowed us to see the amount of times she spoke of her family, i.e. son and husband, as well as religious figures, i.e. Lord and Savior. We could also see the different places she traveled as we tagged place names as well as important events. Through the tags, we had the ability to see which tags were near each other to determine if there were relationships among her two allegiances.

There is a subsection called WordPress that explains the usage of the tool in organizing our final project. We were able to use WordPress to put all of our research and information in one spot to help viewers in understanding our research question.

The Voyant tool gave us multiple ways to find determine relationships in her memoir. The specific tools we used were StreamGraph, Trends, and Word Tree. When thinking of our research question, StreamGraph and Trends provided us with the frequencies of key terms used throughout Elizabeth Grundys’s memoir. We were able to gain an idea of how often she spoke of her family and how often she spoke of her faith, determining which was more important to her at which part of her life. Word Tree graphed connections between key words and their surrounding terms throughout the memoir. We were given the ability to see if there was ever an overlap between religion and family. “With the tools that are now available, such as Voyant 2.0, Antconc, Jigsaw, Gephi, it is possible to extract textual digital data (plain text files) from transcriptions and/or translations and quantify and visualize verbal patterns,” (Faull 18). These tools give us the ability to analyze texts in different ways.

Google Fusion provides users with an analysis between two specific tags. We could see connections between key words and ones that surround them through graphs.

Menus are embedded in the website to aid in the navigation. Users can access information through many different ways. Users can also search key terms in order to find information on them.

With all of these tools, it helped us answer our research question that there are different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church. In Elizabeth Grundy’s case, she was able to find a balance between the two. Her son was heavily involved in the religious community which made it easy for her to prioritize both, often at the same time. Even when she ad a husband, she still kept religion as a priority. She moved to some areas for religious reasons and other areas for familial reasons. As she was dying, the most vulnerable point in her life, she had her son next to her while she spoke of religion. This exemplified the importance of these two things in her life.

Our group did not encounter many difficulties throughout the entire project and even when creating the website. Our main issue occurred when trying to incorporate menus into our site. They were difficult to figure out at first, but we were soon able to complete it. Choosing a website design and adding pages was easy to do.

I really enjoyed this class. It was something totally different from my major. It was nice to branch out and study new things. I found it very interesting.

 

 

 

 

http://grundyhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/

 

 

 

 

Categories
Blog #5 Uncategorized

Blog 5

Elizabeth Grundy traveled throughout Northern England during her lifetime. When transcribing the memoir, I was able to read all of the places she visited, but did not realize the extent at which her and her son traveled. By creating a map of these specific places, I was able to match places with important events and determine which towns were important in her life. I had never really thought about which events took place where and the fact that not all of the important parts of her life took place in one town. They were scattered throughout Northern England but specifically close to Lancashire and Yorkshire. When reading the transcribed memoir, I was unaware that Elizabeth Grundy moved around as often as she did.

 

In a more general sense, mapping can be used to link together different pieces of history. “But what we can do is inform the present more fully with the artifacts of social memory, the evidence of recall from various times and various perspectives,” (Bodenhamer 26). Sometimes, historians have information about a specific event and where it took place but are unsure about the timing. If they find another event that is related to the first, and it occurred in a place nearby, they can link these two events together and estimate a date as to when it occurred. They can also link together different towns across the globe if they plot the linked events. “We select and interpret these cultural artifacts to frame our understanding of the past and present,” (Bodenhamer 25). Historians are able to come up with lists of important events that occurred in several different places and realize how complex each event was and the effort that was involved in each one. “We must direct technology if it is to help us open the past to the multiple perspectives and contingencies we know existed in the past,” (Bodenhamer 26). Mapping allows us to explore these perspectives and allows historians to draw conclusions that they are unsure of.

 

Some important story points in my map that I included were the places where she was born and passed away. I added the town in which she started her School for Girls because this was an important point in her memoir. I also added some background knowledge about her son and his wife that may be missed when reading the memoir because it is mentioned briefly. The reason I added a slide for this was because Grundy’s son was very important to her and this was something important from his life. I also added a slide of a town that related back to her parents and life when she was younger. It provided readers with a sense of how religion became such a large part of her life. Readers are able to gain a sense of how each of these English towns influenced Elizabeth Grundy and her family throughout her life.

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/43564e909fe38e64bb34700eca852209/koczur-grundy/index.html

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/43564e909fe38e64bb34700eca852209/koczur-grundy/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

 

Categories
Blog #4

Blog #4

Through marking up my memoir and rereading it multiple times, I was able to gain a better understanding of the main topics Elizabeth Grundy was trying to portray throughout. In the process of adding tags on certain words, I was able to determine the most frequently used tags; Elizabeth Grundy used people and role names frequently in her memoir. As stated by Pierazzo, “a digital edition can represent many more features than a print publication can,” (Pierazzo 472). She spoke often of her son and some form of God. By doing this, I was able to come up with an idea of the important things in her life; she always made her son a priority and focused on religion everyday. Although the web provides all of these features, sometimes it still lacks features only printed texts can provide. Pierazzo says, “the web has some limitations: we cannot, for instance, reproduce easily some of the calligrammes,” (Pierazzo 472).

In the beginning of the transcription process it was easy to divide up the pages that everyone was assigned to transcribe. Each group member was responsible for 5-6 pages, and every member had their transcriptions finished by the due date. It got harder once we were each assigned with adding tags to our transcribed pages. This part was confusing at first and involved a lot of talk among my group members and I. One member was absent during the class period when we were finishing the tags and did not have it finished in time for when the final file with everyone’s changes were sent out. I was unsure as to how I was going to receive their changes. After experiencing this, I can imagine working in a much larger group with members across the globe makes it very difficult to compile everyone’s work into one space and make the changes necessary throughout the project. Communication is key when participating in group projects, and in larger projects, it is vital that group members complete tasks by the specific due dates otherwise things begin to get much more confusing than they need to be. After completing this project, I have a better appreciation for edited texts and a better understanding as to how they are produced. I use code for my major constantly, and it was interesting to see one of the many things code can be used for as most of my projects in computer science are very different.

Another difficulty our group faced was the decision involving which words should be given which tags. We spoke in class and created a google doc. This document contained the rules to determine the tags of questionable words. These words related to the different names for God and words similar to son or mother. We decided these names for God would be considered role names and words similar to son and mother would not be considered names. If there was a question a group member had during marking up the memoir, they would ask the group during class, and it was get answered. We did not face any difficult decisions during the mark up. Similar to this, we also had to determine whether or not we would change spellings in the memoir to make them correct. Pierrazo states in her article, “Austen’s favoured spellings have been preserved and marked, such as the inversion of the diphthong,” (Pierazzo 469). When transcribing texts to make them accessible on the web, it is difficult to agree on the many rules each member needs to follow during their transcription.

 

Categories
Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3: Timelines

The two modes of representation discussed in Grafton’s, Time in Print, are chronology and geography. By using these two modes of representation, it makes it easier for historians and researchers to piece or link together different pieces of information throughout history. Chronology allows one to determine the order of events while the geography allows one to determine where all of these events took place. The geography could help researchers determine common illnesses at that time in history or match together different groups that were in the same location at the same time. If researchers are able to determine the exact place something happened and the time it happened at, they can use this information and compare it to other information to clarify historical events.

Many times researchers have ideas about different events in history and how they are related. Researchers are able to use the two modes of representation, chronology and geography, to link together these events. Suppose there was a crime committed and there are two people in question. The detectives could use information about the place of the crime scene and the time the crime was committed at. They could then do research into the actions of these two people around the time of the crime and determine how close they were to the scene. These two modes allow researchers to relate events and arrive at conclusions that were otherwise be difficult to come to. Chronology can also be used in other ways. Grafton states, “For Christians, getting chronology right was the key to any practical matters such as knowing when to celebrate Easter and weighty ones such as knowing when the Apocalypse was nigh,” (Grafton 11). This mode of representation can be used to remember when specific calendar events occur or even predict when events in the future would occur.

On the other hand, knowing the time and place of a specific event could lead to incorrect assumptions about what happened at that event. One person may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and not been involved in the event but been mistaken as partaking in it. Chronology and geography cannot always verify events and link together some, but it can provide useful information that will aid in arriving at a conclusion even if it is not the correct one. Although at first glance, one may not think much of a timeline, I do believe it has the ability to tell a story. Grafton writes “Our claim is that the line is a much more complex and colorful figure than it is usually thought,” (Grafton 10). As one moves down the line, they pick up more and more useful information that they can then piece together to create a story. The line is of great importance, “In the graphic arts, the same holds true: from the most ancient images to the most modern, the line serves as a central figure in the representation of time,” (Grafton 14). As one can see, the line resembles much more than just something drawn on a paper.

 

a photo of how the events line up on the timeline


 

 

 

an example of one of the events on our timeline

 

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1MByvlaJQuG8LKCAz5jRj6eiHdwoiN4Iyr1o9VjHIl04&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650