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Blog #2 contextual research

Grafton & TimelineJS Analysis

Blog # 2

Through reading Grafton’s Introduction, I learned that the two modes of representation are chronology and geography. These two modes immensely help clarify historical events, but they also obscure events. With regards to determining all there is to know about a certain event, these two modes help immensely because we know exactly WHEN and WHERE that particular event happened. With this, we can make deductions or inferences about why that said event occurred.

Timelines are actually less than 250 years old (Grafton 14). All they really are is a way of visualizing the numbers that we use to record our history, but they can also restrict our outlook on life. Grafton says “The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have” (Grafton 14). It makes time way more linear than it has to be and almost completely removes the flexibility of our concept of time. It has been hard to come to terms with these ideas and modes of representation, but I have done it successfully. By telling us a one-way story, they have told us a chronology of our perception of the world, but have also erased our opportunity to perceive time as a story.

This concept is actually extremely relevant to my group’s project. We were assigned the Bethlehem memoirs to transcribe an analyze. Other groups’ assignments were the memoir of one person, but we had several different writers to transcribe. So as other groups would have one coherent timeline for all of their events, we had 4 or 5 separate, overlaying timelines.

With this in mind, conceptualizing the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation was near impossible. We were just given seemingly unrelated transcriptions with no background. We had to use different sources to get a deeper understanding of what we read. For example, Professor Faull gave me a book titled “A Tale of Two Plantations”, which depicted the lives of slaves in the Mesopotamian slave plantation in Jamaica, and how the Moravian missionaries brought the Gospel to them.

 

Viewing the timeline as a rigid linearity would be ineffective, as there are multiple stories going on at once. Grafton says that our idea of time “is so wrapped up with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually impossible” (Grafton 13). The key here is flexibility, and being able to perceive several chronologies at once. TimeLine JS made this flexible view possible by stacking the different events on top of each other as they occurred.

Overall, using TimeLine JS made analyzing these events easier in that it gave a way to compare the events throughout time. This has given a deeper meaning to all of our separate work; it has integrated everything we’ve worked for together.

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Blog #2

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For my first time transcribing a memoir, my group and I transcribes a memoir written by the kids of a man named John Wiley.  The memoir is written after the death John Wiley in order to remember in his life. It first starts off by introducing John Wiley and  his family stating that his mother died when he was very young, his father was a member in the congregation for 66 years, he had a brother that was also a member of multiple congregations, and then he also had his sister.  The memoir then describes his early life being a favorite of his teachers, but when moving to the city to start a career he also started to enjoy life and, “sinful pleasure” (3). Around the age of 15 he did not want anything to do with God.  He soon went to London and that is when he decided that he needed to change the way he was living and turn to God. He became a laborer at the Kingwood congregation and started to teach the children there. Shortly after being welcomed into the congregation as a laborer he had his first communion and was visited with a vision of Jesus Christ.  John Wiley devoted himself more to the Church at this time but also started to face hardships with his health. After teaching at the Kingwood Congregation he then was a teacher in Mirfield for several years and then also started to preach the gospel. After several more years of preaching he finally became ordained, but his health was quickly deteriorating.  John Wiley died still proclaiming his devotion to the Lord.

After reading the memoir it is hard not to ask myself, “What were the other family members doing at this time, and what were they feeling?”.  This is written by the children of John Wiley and they seem to be okay with his death since he will be closer to God whom John Wiley devoted much of his life too.  The children writing this memoir do not seem as if they are grieving his death but more celebrating his life. There are also some holes in the story, and I feel like there are parts missing when talking about his mental state.  In no instance do they talk about how worried they were, they always seemed to be positive throughout his whole life.

 

When looking at the document through voyant it helps organize keywords through visual images and much more.  In the John Wiley memoir the 5 most common words are years, time, great, lord, and life.  Lord and life appears a good amount in the memoir since it is about John Wiley’s life and religion played a big part of it.  When talking about time, it referred to time he spent in different places, and years referred to the same thing and also ages of people.  The word great was connected to various sentences and there was no clear pattern.

Above is a visual tool on voyant that allows the viewer to see the most frequent words.  When you put your mouse over one of the words it also highlights other words it is connected to in the document.

Above is the visual tool called “Cirrus” and it again highlights the keywords in the document in a visual image that would be able to be shown to anyone.

Above is a visual tool called “knots” and it has a line for a certain keyword, and every time the word is used the line bends a little bit making a knot.

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Blog #2

Blog #2

Research Question: How do the frequent terms within voyant relate to the theme of John Willey’s memoir?

 

The memoir Rosemary, Jacob, and I transcribed is written by John Willey’s children after his death. Willey was a honorable servant of the Lord in the Brn Church. Willey comes from a religious family; his father, brothers, and himself all held active roles in the Church. Unfortunately, John Willey’s mother passed away when he was just six years old. But Willey’s courage and love allowed him to still live a great and loving life. Willey’s eventual passion for religion at 21 years old gave him the faith and love for something greater than himself. Willey attended and taught at religious schools, growing love for his pupils. Eventually, Willey was given the honor of becoming a minister, one of his goals in life. Later, Willey marries a teacher he worked with, named Susan Hutton, whom Willey had four children with. One of his daughters passed away in her early infancy. Despite a long and happy life, Willey suffered through medical issues his last six years prior to death. Most of his vital organs were affected, and Willey was mostly unable to commit to his duty to the church. He maintained a positive outlook on life through his suffering. Willey was still extremely faithful and believed everything would workout well. All he wanted to do was get back to his duty as a minister. The memoir ends with Willey’s family comforting him through song as he passes away. Willey and his family maintain positive up through his death, believing he is leaving his suffering to go be happy with the Lord. Overall, the memoir of John Willey is an excellent story of a man who lived an honorable life as a servant to his Lord, and eventually had his spirits lifted to be with the Lord.

 

The Willey memoir consists of 3,519 words in total. Of those words, 1,106 were described as unique word forms, displaying the complexity of Willey’s texts. Additionally, Willey’s memoir seems to have a pretty standard sentence structure to todays writing, considering the average sentence length of 33.5 words. Through using Whitley’s tool described as distant reading, I was able to see the key patterns emerging in Willey’s text. For example, illey’s frequently appearing words are years, time, great, Lord, life, love and Jesus. This leads me to believe that Willey lived a happy life, filled with faith. Through comparing Samuel Tippett’s memoir with Willey’s on voyant, there are some clear patterns emerging across their lives. For example, both these memoirs are filled with religion. Common words emerge, like Lord and savior, clearly portraying both these men’s passions toward religion. Additionally, love is a word appearing in both texts, perhaps showing that their faith towards religion promoted a sense of love in their lives. Overall, through examining Willey’s and Tippett’s texts, and skimming through a bunch more, there is a clear sense of a passion towards religion in these memoirs. This is very interesting, considering the different locations and time periods these men lived their lives.

 

Visualization, is a tool especially prevalent on voyant, which was introduced to me by the Whitley reading. Almost every tool I worked with on voyant has some form of visualization to it. For example, the cirrus is an excellent resource for compiling all the key terms. Then, using collocates is a great way to further examine which of those words often relate to each other. For example, I noticed that great and years often appeared near each other, as well as savior and Lord. This leads me to believe Willey had great years in his life and viewed his Lord as his savior.

 

Through examining voyant tools, as well as reading through the Willey text, my research question was clearly answered. There is a very clear connection between the frequently appearing words, and the common theme of Willey’s memoir. For example, the words like years, great, Lord, love and Jesus all clearly portray that Willey’s life was a happy one filled with religion. This is reflected in my reading, as Willey devoted his life to his religious workings and seemed to be happy with this choice. Willey also used his faith to maintain happiness in his suffering toward the end of his life. Similarly, Whitley explains how human brains are able to easily notice patterns in their reading. Interestingly, voyant tools put all those patterns in one place, allowing me to notice the same themes I picked up on while reading.

 

 

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Blog #2

As a group, working on this project has allowed for us to develop a research question about the role of the congregation and if the Moravian people perceived it in a positive or negative way.  From what I could understand about these memoirs, the congregation offered hope and reconciliation with their faith.  

The portion that I transcribed from the Henry Unger memoir was told from the third person point of view and talked about his journey to find mercy and forgiveness from his savior and congregation. It was described as finding “Rest for his poor Soul.” In the second memoir that I assisted in transcribing, Anna Elizabeth Rauch, it talked about her sharing how sinners can seek forgiveness to “Negroes” in Mesopotamia. She struggled with her health, but felt that she was visited by the Lord and needed to spread his word to the rest of the people of Mesopotamia. Lastly, the Rosine Tanneberger memoir talked about her life and journey to find “rest for her poor soul” as well. All three of these memoirs spoke of their religion as a means of solving underlying issues.

When all of our memoirs were entered into the Voyant Tools website, I was able to explore this research through the digital humanities approach. There were numerous key terms brought to my attention that assisted in the answering of this research question. I was able to see how often the words “Heart,” “Year,” “Came,” “Dear,” “Saviour,” and “Congregation” were present in the Bethlehem memoirs. With this website, we could also explore how the words were used in relation to other words. Also, it put the most commonly used words into a visual of a graph that determined trends amongst the words. We compared our memoir to the Latrobe memoirs and found that their most frequently used words were “Lord,” “Dear,” “God,” “Saviour,” and “Let.”

This was more helpful, compared to the traditional humanistic means, because the viewer is using distant reading. As Whitley describes it, distant reading uses specific data like quantitative and qualitative information to create a visual representation of what is read. This is a different form of reading and offers the analyzation of textual data. To quote Whitley “…the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they might otherwise be, whereas literary close readings often reveal that apparently straight forward texts are more complex than they might otherwise seem” (pg. 188).

The use of Voyant Tools allowed me to visualize the most commonly used terms and actually see how important religion was in the lives of the Moravian people. When I was working on this assignment, originally, I hadn’t paid attention to what I was reading. When I was finished transcribing I read over the material and struggled to find context in the sentences. From the Whitley reading we did for class I learned that many of the tools can pull out words that we don’t necessarily recognize while we are reading, specifically words that we tend to skip over.  This was made evident after I entered the memoirs into Voyant because it became clear to me how often they spoke of their religion and how positively their “Savior” was represented.