Our website: http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu
In the process of creating our website about the life of Esther Latrobe and her contributions to the Moravian Church, we had to make decisions and compromises along the way as we learned more deeply about Esther’s life.
The first thing we had to agree on was the composure of our website: the screen layout, pages to include, and a header. Our primary goal in this endeavor was to make the site as easy to navigate and as pleasing to the eye as possible. We decided to include the introduction to the Latrobe Memoir as our header which reads “Brief- Memoir of our late happily departed Sister Esther Latrobe drawn up by her Husband & Brother.”
The first page you see when opening the website is our Who was Esther Latrobe? page. On this page, Esther’s life is summarized along with our primary research question. My parts of the assignment centered around research-based pages: The World During Esther’s Life and Latrobe Legacy. I chose to fix myself on these pages because I saw them as the most interactive and the ones that would allow me to learn the most about Ether while creating- also due to my confidence in my research skills.
The first obstacle I encountered was WordPress. It was something I had never used before and was almost completely unfamiliar with aside from the Humanities Now site. So, I made it my first goal to familiarize myself and learn the difference between pages and posts, how to manipulate the menu, etc. After doing this, I had a much better understanding of the process.
A lot of the difficulties we encountered were due to the nature of the memoir. A huge part of Esther’s life and memoir were her multiple illnesses that left her bed-ridden and near death several times in her life. While they were incredibly significant events in her life, her memoir only mentioned them briefly and in very little detail, so we were left to wonder the actual illnesses she suffered from and things like the length of time she was ill, about her recovery, and how she was able to miraculously recover so many times when she seemed to be on the brink of death.
However little she talked about her illnesses, one thing that was never left up to our imaginations was her emotion. Most of the memoir was comprised of her prayer and emotion about her relationship with god. Whenever her life reached a point which took a toll on her greatly, she turned to God immediately and allowed her faith to guide her.
Like her illnesses, we heard very little through the memoir about Esther’s family. One of the only actual pieces of information we had was the name of her husband- which actually allowed us to learn a lot more about her family: we were able to find the name of her son and learn about the life of her husband after her death (he went on to have 6 more children). Aside from this, however, it was difficult to learn much about Esther and her family through research.
The main issue in researching Esther’s life is the fact that the line of Latrobes that took part in the Moravian Church is hundreds of individuals long and are inter-related in a multitude of ways. Due to this, I decided that it would be interesting to have a page on the website dedicated to the Latrobe legacy that went beyond Esther’s lifetime and included some very significant events.
Another challenge that we had to deal with, not only in the final project but also when approaching the timeline and storymap, was the fact that the few times that the memoir offered dates, they were often given without a year and left for us to either calculate or estimate to our best ability given the information surrounding it. For example, we were given the date of her son’s birth without a year, at which point we had to do a few calculations and a bit of research on the Latrobes to find his birth year and name.
Something that was completely new to me in this course was the focus on material that was so untouched. By this I mean that the idea that we were the first to transcribe the Moravian Memoirs meant that there was very little information on the subjects of the memoirs as well as about the church itself. According to Professor Faull’s Moravian Memoirs: Pillars of an Invisible Church, following the 18thcentury, each Moravian church member was asked to keep records of their lives in the form of memoirs. “From the mid-eighteenth century on, each member of the worldwide Moravian church has been asked to write a memoir, intended to articulate and preserve each individual’s path from a state of ignorance of grace to his or her rebirth in Christ” (Faull, 2017 ,p.10) It is incredible to me that there are a number of Moravian memoirs in existence that have been so little explored and interpreted. While it definitely made the research process a bit more tedious, it was amazing to be able to be the first to derive the story of her life from the memoir and discover new things about it constantly along the way.
Along with the unexplored nature of the church came a difficulty in finding images as well as information, and the places that Esther lived throughout her life also posed challenges. She did live in several places that are quite well-known, such as Bristol and Ayr. However, places like Tytherton and Gracehill were hard to depict using images; in fact, we were unable to pinpoint Tytherton on our storymap (we ended up pinning it in the location where it would be had it been labeled on the map).
The first page of the website that I created was the one about the context of Esther’s life, or significant things going on in the world around Esther at the time. The first challenge for me was deciding what to include in the page. While there were significant world events that occurred during her life, many were not actual influences to her and thus I decided only to include events that may have played a role in her and her family’s life. The events I decided were significant enough to include were The Great Awakening, the introduction and abolishment of the Penal Laws in Ireland and other parts of Europe, the Cholera Pandemic, along with other medical advances made around the time she was alive- considering the significance of illness in her life.
The difficulties I had in creating this page were mostly due to the fact that Latrobe spoke so little of current events occurring at the time of her life, so I was left to decide completely independently what outside forces may have been influencing her life.
The second section I did was the Latrobe Legacy page. I actually enjoyed creating this page a lot. I first had to do several hours of research on the Latrobes and choose those to include in the section. The first issue with this was the multitude of Latrobes that have existed around Esther’s lifetime. There were hundreds of Latrobes for me to sift through, however there were only a handful of whom made significant contributions to the world. I decided to include the remainder of Esther’s husband’s life, as well as the life of Benjamin Latrobe (a Moravian preacher), his son, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (arguably the most memorable Latrobe; who was a famous architect and worked on the US capital building and the White House), Christian Ignatius Latrobe (a composer and advocate of Mozart), and finally Charles Joseph Latrobe, who was the first Lieutenant of what is now Australia. The most difficult part of creating this section was doing hours of r
esearch trying to find the relationships between the Latrobes I included. Three of the men are directly related: Father and two sons, however it was virtually impossible to pinpoint their official connection to Esther with the multitude of family members to consider.
Personally, the most valuable part of the entire process of Esther Latrobe’s memoir transcription, manipulation, and interpretation was the ability to create never-before documented information and lay it out in a way that makes it accessible and understandable to anyone hoping to learn more about the Moravian church.
The process of marking up the Esther Latrobe memoir transcription was certainly a tedious process, but definitely did affect the way I understood its content. When considering when to tag things like emotions, our group had to work closely to decide what we would qualify as an emotion and to do our best to keep the tags consistent throughout the transcription. Just as Pierazzo claims in her article, with each decision about what kind of things would be marked with what tags, we were forced to deeply interpret and contemplate what the text was communicating and through this we were able to understand the text in a much more elaborate way. Because our text relied so little on travel and so heavily on emotion and prayer, we had to depend a lot on each other to maintain the use of certain tags. After the markup was complete, it was really interesting to be able to see how often certain things come up and see what points in the transcription were more eventful. We were much more clearly able to see the points of illness and of great emotion in Esther’s life and see how proximal they were in relationship to other events. It was also valuable to learn about the XML markup system and seeing the process of our transcriptions becoming viewable web pages. One of the main points that is referenced numerous times in Pierazzo’s article is about the ability of the markup to capture as much detail from the original document as is possible on a digital setting. We were able to understand this idea by learning that each character serves a purpose in a markup and by moving one piece out of place, the whole thing changes. Lastly, we were also able to experience the back end of something used in everyday life, that I have personally never seen. To experience just how elaborate encoded material is and how different it is from what actually appears on a screen is eye opening to students like me who use their computer and phone every day without much thought about what is making it work the way it does. Overall, through the markup of the Latrobe transcription, we were able to not only gain a deeper understanding of the text but also learn about the process of encoding and the way that it plays into our everyday life.
