Category: Assignment #1

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

The text that I had was an account of the life of Anna Rosina Anderson. She was born in 1727 on August 9th. She was a very religious person, who oftentimes used faith to justify the things that happened to her. She lost her father at the age of 7 and since then she’s moved around a lot. The process of creating the digital text was not the easiest task to do because it was written in a different time period. It was from the 18th century therefore resulting in it being almost a different language. Also the fact that it written out instead of typed was another problem that I had to face because at some points the handwriting was illegible, taking away from my understanding of the story. I also encountered the problem of the fact that she referenced places in Germany and in England that I wasn’t familiar with. That with the fact that it was written made it hard for me to be able to make out the places that she was talking about. Other than that, there were not any problems that prohibited me from understanding the text. I was not that connected to the documents in the beginning because I was too focused on just trying to understand the handwriting. However I started to appreciate the document when it all came together in the end. I was able to give a thorough read to understand the story as a whole instead of understanding one sentence, then forgetting what it said because I was already onto the next sentence.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

Working with these old memoirs from the Moravian lives projects was very interesting and surprisingly fun.  Being able to read something that was written so long ago was something I have never done, and it was really engaging.  As I read about John Wiley’s life, I was able to imagine his life and almost grow attached to what I was writing down and feel like what I was doing was really important.  Even though reading the piece was engaging and interesting, it presented some challenges. To be able to create a digital text, we had to be able to read what the document said and write down exactly what was written, even if the punctuation or spelling was wrong.  The words were faded and the way that people wrote in the past was a lot different from how people write today. From the way they wrote cursive the their word choice, it was hard to be able to read it at times. Letters like F, T and L were sometimes hard to distinguish, as well as two words close together without a space.  Also, words were misspelled which presented a whole new challenge. We had to type out the misspelling and then correct it, but at times the misspelling was hard to make out what word they were trying to say. Luckily for the John Wiley memoirs, the archivist that had the documents were able to send our group clearer images of the original copies which was a game changer for being able to transcribe.  The help of the professors and also the students that came in to help us was also monumental for being able to transcribe, because their eyes have been trained to read these old documents. We then had to tag different parts of the text and point out a person’s name, dates, places, misspellings, and other things of that nature.

John Wiley Memoir

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Assignment #1

Assignment 1 – John Willey transcription

Link to transcription of the John Willey text (I transcribed pages 16-22):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOTUXh2VYeFLDoZfbqKbYCa9QtGikaS4gYO-hvPEmPg/edit

 

The text Rosemary, Jacob and I transcribed was a 19th century England memoir, written by John Willey. We transcribed 22 pages of text, written in cursive, to make the reading more accessible to future scholars. At first, I really struggled with identifying words and letters, leaving question marks on almost 40% of the words on my first page. However, as I went through the transcription process, I became more familiar with Willey’s handwriting. This allowed for me to pick out letters and words much more easily than before. For example, every time Willey wrote “in” he has the dot supposed to be above the “i” over the “n” off to the right. After reading through a lot of text, I eventually realized his writing styles and had a much easier time transcribing Willey’s text. Another issue I encountered was that some of the text was written very lightly, and parts of the image were blurry. However, this was promptly fixed by Professor Faull, by gathering a clearer version of the memoir from the archive. Professor Faull’s accessibility to that was very helpful, and showed me how well the digital humanities community is able to help each other out in completing transcriptions. Lastly, my classmates and professors were extremely helpful in transcribing some words that were unfamiliar to me. Transcribing Willey’s text allows me read it in a way more familiar to me, rather than struggling through reading his old, cursive handwriting.

Through reading Willey’s memoir and noticing frequently appearing words and themes, I was able to recognize the main points Willey portrays. Firstly, Willey speaks of an extremely religious and faithful man. He often speaks of Jesus, love, church and God. Willey describes God and Jesus as his saviour and speaks on how his connection to religion promoted a happy and loving life. Additionally, this man is suffering through a fatal disease throughout the text before passing away at the end. However, his faith allows for a positive outlook on the entire situation. This child of God, as described by Willey, was said to have a happy death. He was relieved from his suffering, and onto spend his after-life with God. Overall, Willey tells a tremendous story about the waning moments of the life of an honorable and faithful man.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

I never thought that just transcribing a document would make you understand the story of the person that wrote the it. While writing, the only thing you focus on is what each individual words is, and nothing about the author. For five pages, I struggled to read cursive because I have not seen the style in years. I had to look over the cheat sheets for cursive letters once we started because I just could not remember what some of the letters looked like. In the moment, you don’t really care what the person is saying, you are just trying to figure out what each word is. After finishing my five pages, with lots of question marks, I then had to go back and get help from others. Sometimes, it is just about asking the right person. Some people might know a lot more cursive than others. For example, in our group Meg Koczur remembered her cursive very well so I would ask her for help a lot. Then once you are finally done nitpicking words, you can reread your work to double check everything. Once you get to this point is when you really begin to feel a connection with the author. It is so interesting that none of these documents have never been written so we are the first ones to actually read it. They are just simple documents in which people talk about experiences they had. In Elizabeth Grundy’s work, some of the times she was just talking about some of her dreams. It just made me overjoyed to be able to read about somebody else’s life. Coming into this class, I did not really know what to expect from digital humanities, but this really changed my mind for the better.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nv-N7N0rR6puaTNT2_QHv_918cxgYppQjCQikAxSNqQ/edit?usp=sharing