Author: Olivia Smith

Olivia Smith is a student at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. She was born and raised in Manasquan, New Jersey. She is currently apart of the Bucknell Women's Rowing Team and plans to major in Psychology and Creative Writing.

Categories
final blog

Olivia Smith- Final Project

After working closely with my group members (Sam Salazar, Brendan Matthys, and Ethan Conklin) and familiarizing ourselves with the resources used throughout the semester, our final project seemed less overwhelming than I had originally anticipated. Essentially, this project consisted of a collective form of all the “mini” projects and assignments that we had already done for The Humanities Now! class. We were just giving them a home when we uploaded them onto the WordPress site.

I had worked with the WordPress platform in a previous class last year and already knew some basics about operating and designing my own website. Though Brendan did most of the changes on the website, my fellow group members and I were assisting him in what we thought best suited our project. Brendan became the leader of this group very quickly and began delegating different tasks to each member and offered assistance when we needed it. This was very effective for the members of our group because it really pushed us to get the work done. I know that the members of my group and I are very proud with the way that our website has turned out. Additionally, I think that creating a website for the research that we did on the Bethlehem Memoirs was the best way to fully display our hard work from the semester.

We wanted to make the central focus of our site our research question: “Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian people according to our memoir? If so, how does it play into their lives?” We did this by keeping the question centered on the home page so that our viewers could reference it at any point. Also, located on the home page is a simple explanation of the purpose of our site and the various technologies that we have used to answer this question.

After we transcribed every memoir, we uploaded them onto the “Oxygen” platform that Dr. Jakacki taught us how to use. From there, we were able to tag people’s names, place names, emotions, events, and health. After that, we extracted the entities that were important in answering our research question. We chose to compare emotions to place names to analyze how the Moravian people viewed their congregations. The entities were uploaded onto a “Google Fusion” table which you can view in the Tag Frequencies tab on the website.

One of my favorite parts about this website is how interactive it is. The Timeline, Storymap.Js, and Voyant tabs provide information about our research while also requiring the viewer of the site to follow along and explore each platform. Because the Bethlehem Memoirs consisted of multiple people, our timeline project was very unique. We had a stacked timeline that so that the viewer could see the events that occurred during this time period according to each person from the memoir. Grafton wrote about this in his introduction by saying “by comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work”(Grafton, pg. 15).

I think the most important tab located on our website would have to be the Storymap.js tab. You can explore a story map for any one of the four major memoirs that we transcribed. Because there were numerous people in the Bethlehem memoirs, each member from our group had focused on one particular person from the memoir throughout the semester. On this tab, you can select one of those people and it will take you to their storymap. This was essential for our website because it displayed how far each person traveled by pinpointing places that they mentioned in their memoirs. This visualization of mapping that we used was principal to the project because it took every point and created a visual that allowed the viewer to analyze the distance that was travelled.Adding to that point, Drucker wrote, “…however we classify the visualization that we use, they all require the same analytic approach to expose the working of their graphical organization as meaning-producing” (Drucker, pg. 66). My memoir, Rosine Tanneberger, was kind of different from the others because her journey was short. She only traveled from her birth place of Mankendorf, Moravia to Gnadenfrei, Germany.

Lastly, we chose to use Voyant. This was the first platform that we explored for this class and we felt that it would be pretty necessary to include it in this project. Similarly to our entities, it extracts words from the memoirs and puts it into a distinct visualization, but using Voyant we were able to analyze it through all of our memoirs collectively. This platform is pretty cool to play around with because there are so many different options to create your own visualization of the words. We only included the a few that we felt represented our memoir best. These included Cirrus, TermsBerry, Textual Arc, and Links. My favorite visualization comes from the Cirrus tool because it creates a clear depiction of the visualization that emphasizes the most frequently used words. The biggest words are used the most across all memoirs, while the smaller words are used less. “Heart”, “Dear”, and “Congregation” are just few of the many words, but they are seen as the largest words using this tool.

Overall, I think that my group members and I are very proud of the work that we have put into this project and website. The most important part of this whole project is that we got to explore the lives of Moravian people through analyzing their work. We had fun creating this website together and even added a special tab that includes Moravian Music which you can listen to while exploring the site. Even though there was a lot that was involved in creating this project, it made the semester fly by and I’m really going to miss working with Ethan, Brendan, and Sam as well as these memoirs. I hope you enjoy our website just as much as I do!

http://bethlehemhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

 

P.S. Thank you for a great semester!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Blog #5

Blog #5

My experience with StoryMap JS was frustrating at times, to say the least, but once my map was completed there was a clear visual representation of the path traveled by Rosine and, her husband, Michel Tanneberger. I struggled the most with finding the towns on my basemap because of how many were present and how small the font was. Once I located both the towns that were included in my memoir, it was clear to me how far Rosine and Michel had to travel and it was evident how important space and time were in relation to their travels. As Bodenhamer mentions, “We are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order our world” (pg. 14).

Back in the 18th century, their main form of transportation was by foot. When I put both of these locations into the modern form of Google Maps it says that it is 286km, which is 177.712 miles. Though the memoir doesn’t reveal where or when Rosine stopped along her journey, I’m sure that the places she chose were influential to her overall experience of traveling to a foreign land. I believe that the route of travel taken by the Tanneberger’s most accurately represents change, historical, in a spatial way. Bodenhamer explains this in the book by saying, “Spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product determinant of change. They are not passive settings but the medium for the development of culture” (pg. 16).

I believe that mapping out historical events can create a visualization that is appealing both spatially and contextually. It usefully links both history and geography to create a story through time. After creating my own Story Map for this memoir and reading the passage from Bodenhamer, I realized how important this was to the project. It brought all of our information together to create a visual story.

Rosine Tanneberger’s memoir was very short, so I was limited with choice on which points to plot. I decided to plot her birthplace and where she traveled to. In addition to that, I plotted points in those towns (Mainly Mankendorf) when she expressed a feeling, and then described why.  Bodenhamer justified this point in his passage as, “the spaces of interest to the humanities also could be personal- emotional space or the body in space- and even metaphorical or fictional…” (pg. 21). Now that I have more experience working with maps and the Story Map JS website, I’m feeling more confident in my abilities to understand the visual and spatial representation that I created through this project with my memoir.

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/e4b672c558d1e2012a20b97975d43abf/olivia-smith-bethlehem-memoirs/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

 

 

Categories
Blog #4

Blog Post #4

As a group working on the Bethlehem memoirs, it was difficult to decide how to transcribe and tag our memoirs considering they were all authored by different people. In order to remain consistent, we decided to use the original format for the texts as best we could and include the ampersands and original spellings for words such as “Saviour.” In addition, we kept where the author capitalized random words. This was a decision made by all group members and it was one that was very difficult. We struggled to find the line where our decisions were altering the texts significantly. As Pierazzo emphasizes Driscoll’s point in the article, Driscoll says, “we might conclude that one possible and tempting answer to the question ‘where to stop’ could be ‘nowhere’, as there are potentially infinite sets of facts to be recorded. Nevertheless such an answer opens the field to more theoretical and practical concerns” (pg. 466). The marking up of these transcriptions has enabled me to understand that though portions of the original document are present, they are still being altered. Our transcriptions of the Bethlehem memoirs have been changed to be better understood by the reader and in some ways that could affect the originality of the texts.

With the members of my group, we decided to tag “Jesus,” “Saviour,” and “Holy Ghost,” as people to remain consistent in our TEI model. Also, we thought that it was a good idea to change our abbreviated terms like “Br.” to the full word of “Brethren.” This process was most interesting to me in this project because it felt like I, personally, was bringing my transcription to life. Pierazzo explains this process of tagging in the best way possible by stating, “The output displays the transcribed text as closely as possible to the original document, but it is the scripts that store the knowledge (the scholarship) of how to produce such an edition. One might use a culinary metaphor here: the source contains the ingredients, the scripts contain the recipe, and the output represents the cooked dish” (pg. 473). I was identifying the key terms and encoding them at the same time. In the article written by Pierazzo, she explains how, “One of the reasons why the TEI model is particularly effective is because it enables the encoding and transcription of several alternatives for the same segment allowing, for example, the encoding of abbreviated forms along with the expanded ones, or of erroneous passages and their editorial corrections” (pg. 473). Overall, we hadn’t encountered any disputes about our markup decisions because we had collectively agreed to use similar tags and worked closely on our own individual transcriptions. Each document was different, except for the way we decided to format it.

 

Categories
Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3

When events are placed in chronological order it presents a visual of the order in which the events took place. This is important because when readers are presented with new and important information containing multiple dates, it’s hard to mentally sort out that information. As Grafton points out, creating a chronological order for events represents history in a way that is contextual, visual, and memorable. In my opinion, a line is capable of telling both a story and chronology of events that took place.

The above image shows how the line is represented in a spatially.

Through the Timeline.js project, I was able to understand how particular events in time influenced the decisions of the people from the memoirs and how it affected their lives. Because our memoir had so many components, we created our timeline by stacking the data. As a result, a line was created through space by the website. Grafton wrote about how W.J.T. Mitchell said, “The fact is that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time, that we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space” (13). As a group, a few of the dates that we had overlapped each other. If this information wasn’t stacked and written out chronologically, it would’ve been difficult to understand. Grafton made this point evident in his introduction by saying, “by comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work” (15).

In this image you can see how the dates are stacked based on their chronology.

For myself, the most difficult part of this project was finding contextual events that correlated with my memoir. Once we each found dates that we felt suited this project, the timeline created a chronological story that was easily and better understood. Though it was difficult, our information allowed our group to explore the relationship between ideas and modes of representation. Overall, the information that we found added to the development of our timeline and furthered our understandings of the Bethlehem memoirs.