Category: Blog #2

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Blog #2: Distant Reading

The document, Harriett Lees + Family was a memoir about a thirty year old women, Harriett Lees who was born on February 11th, 1811 in Woodford cum Membris, the country of Northhampton. She was a wife to thirteenth brother, William Lees, and a mother of two sons. Her marriage on June 4th, 1838 William Lees sparked and advanced her religious beliefs. She was became a member of the Brn’s Church where she found herself attending regularly. She was extremely religious and believed God “will not lay upon us more than we can bear”. She often quoted the bible throughout her memoir, which was very compelling. Two instance in her life where she demonstrated her spirituality and religious beliefs was when both her brother and sister passed. She was distraught and found that attending chapel was the best way to cope with her sadness. When others recommended staying home instead of attending chapel due to her poor health, she would respond ‘”I am able to go, the Lord blesses any soul more than the effort injures my feeble frame'”. She would attend chapel as long as she had strength. Harriett Lees’s “health was delicate” and “she was often subject to bad colds attended by severe cough” (5). She struggled with her  health through her pilgrimage and two pregnancies, which ultimately led to death.

After transcribing and reading the fascinating text, Harriett Lees + Family, Hailey and I became very interested on the research question, what is the typical language of a married sister in the Moravian church? When responding to our research question, the use of Voyant was useful and helpful. This tool highlighted the most frequent words and phrases in our text, making it easy to see what was of importance. It offered us a way to look deeply into the text and observe what hardships she faced and how she overcame them. Voyant is an efficient and more pleasing way to gain the important information needed from a long text. For example, some words cirrus highlighted were sister, savior, time, strength, church and mourning. With the most frequent words displayed, I was able to make some accusations about the text. For example, with seeing the word strength and time, I was able to understand that Harriett’s health was at stake. I was also able to sense that their was tragic events and her emotions were scattered with seeing the frequent words mourning. And at last, seeing the common words church, God, and Savior demonstrated that Harriett Lees was extremely religious. Voyant is helpful in many other ways as well. For example, Voyant showed me that the Harriett Lees memoir Hailey and I transcribed is 2,099 words and includes 731 unique words, which I found slightly surprisingly.

Voyant was also useful because it featured the key and distinctive terms in the memoir. Hailey and I used the Memoir of Br John Willey to get accurate distinctive words from the Harriet Lee’s Memoir. The words that were displayed include tho, fit, partner, oh, and lee. The one word that is most relevant and of importance to answering our question we proposed is “partner”. The distinctive word “partner” was used when discussing Harriet Lee’s marriage with her husband. This was significant in throughout the memoir when William supported Harriett through her sickness and births of her two children. There marriage was strong and they shared a true love with one another. Voyant helped me make connections and understand the memoir a lot better than I had before.

One of Whitley’s methods I used throughout this process is visualization. Visualizations sparked new ideas and questions about what I was transcribing, which was very fun! Three specific ways I used spatial reading on Voyant was through the tools of cirrus, collocates graphs, and bubbliness, which is shown below. Bubbliness visualizes and distributes the terms in the text, while collocate graphs represent key words that occur in close proximity. Cirrus is another visualization tool that measures the top frequency words of the text. All three ways are a unique way to analyze text.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=df109f8e08232a569e886362ca2e885b

My personal favorite method  I used throughout this process on Voyant is spatial reading. Spatial reading is the “idea that reading and understanding large amounts of texts can be overcome if the information is transformed into a more spatial manner/ representation because it can be explored by our visionary processes (Whitley 194). I find spatial reading very effective and more enjoyable than sequential reading. Another technique I used in this process from Whitley’s reading is distant reading. Distant reading is “the act of stepping back from the text you’re reading and study the “broad patterns that emerge when you consider a wide swath of texts”(188). I started looking at the most frequent words and their contexts, which provided me a lot of important information.

 

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Blog 2-Rosemary Rong

The main idea of the Willey memoir is that a faithful priest named John Wiley spent his whole life to be pray. The memoir which was written by Wiley’s children illustrated Wiley’s early life between 1781 and 1793 as bittersweet as his mother died when he was six. Still, he grew up with teacher Bradley ‘s care and love until he was twelve. Two years later, he learnt a trade in Bedford, where he started to question the world and reflect himself as a man with sinfulness. In order to redeem himself, in 1802, he went to Bristol where he saw the Congregation for the first time in his life.  In 1806, he served as a teacher in Mirfield school. About ten years later, he was married to Sgle. Sr. Susan Hutton, a teacher at Gracehill. After the marriage, the couple had four children and lived happily in Ballinderry. In May 1841, he had a violent attack of influenza in Cootehill. In the hope of recovering from his painful illness, he served the Lord and Saviour more faithfully than ever. During the last year of his life, he spent four months near Bally-Castle and returned to Gracehill in October. His wife and the three of his children assembled around his bed to witness his gentle departure from this world in October 1847.

 

Via Voyant, I compared both the Willey memoir and the Harriett Lees memoir as these two memoirs were composed at the same time period and they are from London archives.  In the perspective of lexical, the Lees memoir was written in plenty of long sentences and its average sentence words is 80.7 while Willey memoir’s average sentence words is 33.4. Noticeably, the vocabulary densities of both texts are at almost the same level, the Lees memoir is 0.348 and the Willey memoir is 0.310. Based on the average sentence words, the author of the Lees memoir obtain more written skills than the author of the Willey memoir. And the vocabulary densities justifies this conclusion. However, we cannot be 100 percent confirmed as the total lengths of these two memoirs are different. In the contrast of the Lees’ 2099 words and 731 unique word forms,  the whole text of Willey memoir consists of 3505 words in total and 1087 unique word forms. Apart from that, the Willey’s five most frequent words are years, time, great, lord and time. Two common words between two memoirs are great and time. “Great” is to express the extent of certain events or someone and “time” is to illustrate a person’s life in the chronical way. In the perspective of key words in Willey memoir, through the termberry screen, five key words are congregation, lord,time, great and life.  The following graphs are generated through Voyant. The first one is collocates graphs, which represents a network graph where keywords in green are shown linked to collocates in maroon according Voyant’s tools help page. For example, the word “year” is related to “laborer,” “spent,” “age,” and “life.”  According to Whitley’s reading, the author expects that readers can read the digital reading in two mode: browse mode and search mode. The Voyant provides various visualizations  so that even if a reader may not be able to read the memoir in details, he/she can grab the gist of a memoir directly from dozens of graphs. The second graph is cirrus. The words are in eye-catching colors to impress readers and arouse readers’s interests to read the memoir.  In the Whitley’s reading, it is said that visualizations are intended neither to stand as definitive interpretations of literary texts nor to provide direct answers to research questions. Rather, the goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inqury. Personally speaking, colorful words assembled together pushes me to inquire this memoir deeper. The third graph is scatterplot. I imputted both the whole memoir and one-third of the memoir that I transcribed and Voyant generated this graph. This graph not only confirms that the whole memoir is written in the same style, but also differentiate the part that I transcribed from the whole. This is significant because the reader can expect what distinctive meanings from each part of the memoir.  It also serves the function of wrestling with questions that close reading alone might otherwise be unable to answer mentioned in Whitley’s reading. If scholars confront the problem of comparing  two similar memoirs, then use this graph is a starting point.

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Blog #2

For my group’s transcriptions, we analyzed the Bethlehem memoirs, which include memoirs about Joseph Lingard, Henry Unger, Anna Elizabeth Rauch, and others. Since these memoirs are typically associated with the Christian church, we wanted to find out what kind of impact the church had in their lives. Our decided central question is: Was the Congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of the Moravian People?

The manuscript that I analyzed was about the life of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I had the first five out of the nine pages of the small account of her life and “departure”.  In these first few pages, Anna travels to Jamaica to visit her slaves on the Mesopotamia slave plantation. Throughout the manuscript, Anna praises God for her safe travels to Jamaica. She first started at Port Royal, and then retired to Carmel, where she came down with rheumatic fever. At that time, they didn’t have a cure, so rheumatic fever was potentially terminal. She felt a little better later on, and went to visit her slaves every now and then in Mesopotamia. Anna was really friendly with the slaves, and she also maintained a great relationship with God at this time. She became really weak in 1762, and eventually reached the point where she could barely move. At one point, her husband proposed her to go to Mesopotamia. She felt too weak to go, but went anyways, insisting she had made out with her Savior concerning it. In this last page of my part of the memoirs, she confronted to Charles while crying, and said her final goodbyes to him, because she knew she was terminal.

Voyant proved to be a superior way to analyze the transcriptions as a whole, as well as my individual transcription. Voyant was especially helpful in that the word analysis tools provided proved to be extremely helpful to me.

I liked the cirrus in that it gave me a physical manifestation of all of the different word frequencies. I also enjoyed the collocates feature, which gave the most occurring context of each word. One of the most prominent adjacencies was with “dear” and “savior”, which helps to convey their attitude towards religion. Whitney believes that “word clouds have proven to be quite popular…for their practical ability to visually identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitney 199).

Voyant’s Cirrus

My personal favorite way to analyze the text was with TermsBerry. This was a visually appealing way of analyzing the context of the most prominent words in the text. The TermsBerry consists of “berries” of different sizes with regards to the frequency of the word. When you scroll over that word with the mouse, it glows green and the words that are in context with that word glow up in red.

These specific tools would not be available for me if it was not for the growing industry of digital humanities. Before the age of modern technology, it would not be possible to perform such a vast analysis on a text this size in the same span of time. As in the words of Whitney “the forces of the digital era are rethinking the ways that read at the same time that American literature scholars are rethinking the ways that we archive large bodies of texts” (Whitney 201).With these means of analysis, I am able to draw significant conclusions about the text, such as that religion and the congregation are proposed with a positive connotation. It seems as if the missionaries genuinely enjoy their devotion to the Lord, and their life revolves an optimistic viewpoint of our Creator.

For the entire Bethlehem memoir transcription, my words with the highest frequency were savior(20), heart(18), dear(14), year(13), congregation(11), and brethren(10). Upon seeing these visualizations, I started to derive an answer for my central question. As in the wise words of Whitley, “The goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inquiry” (Whitley 189). The pattern that consistently emerges in all of the visual tools is the prevalence of all the ecclesiocentric behavior.

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Blog #2

Blog #2: Samuel Tippett

In this group project, we transcribed the writing of Samuel Tippett. Below is a summary of his writing.

Samuel Tippett was born in year 1711 in Bitton. From his mentions of wanting to die, he appears to be depressed. He mentions that he wishes he had died earlier in life and talks about how he will go to hell. His father died from alcohol consumption when he was young, and he was raised by a single mother. His mother was strict on him but allowed him to go play with other boys. He lied and said nasty words when he was young. He regrets not practicing religion when he was younger as it could have helped him become a better person from the beginning. When he was 10 years old, he got more and more corrupt as he started working at a coal pit. His mother wanted him to become an apprentice, but he did not want to leave. Tippett got married in 1736 and had eleven children. He went to Hannam Mount and learned from a preacher that Jesus Christ would accept and forgive anyone, including sinners like him. He started fasting multiple times each week and prayed about a dozen times each day in the name of Jesus. He saw Christ not only as his savior but also his best friend, making complaints to him. He saw himself as having no friends other than Christ as He was the only person that could satisfy his poor heart. He became a part of a group that would gather and pray. He had found happiness in religion. Tippett spent a lot of time with his family as he grew older. He still prayed daily but wanted to be closer to Christ, he needed Christ as his life drew closer to an end. He needed his best friend and wanted to spend the rest of his time with Him.

Religion and faith gave Tippett hope in life. Before he turned to religion, he saw himself as a bad person, a sinner, someone who deserved to go to hell. Once he started praying, once he turned to Christ, he saw himself as a much better person than he used to be. His faith gave him a new perspective in life. If Jesus could forgive someone with such a poor heart as him, then maybe his life was worth living. He wished he was born in the time of Jesus as he would do anything even die for Him. Religion allowed him to be a new much happier and a better person.

Since he did not use any periods, we were unable to correctly examine how many sentences he had but his vocabulary density is 0.209, meaning he used 2 unique words for every 10 words he wrote. His total word count came to be about 3,800 words. Since he did not continue his education, he does make many spelling mistakes. Using Voyant and the tools it provides, we were able to do distant reading that Whitley talked about. We are able to analyze words like we would numbers and data. We were able to use it to do spatial reading where we could find words and phrases and the patterns between them. This helped determine what Tippett’s intention and overall tone was for the writing. We used these digital tools to complement the old text to gain an understanding on the writing.

Click on the picture to view the Cirrus

Through this Cirrus, we can see that a few of his most frequent words are heart, times, time, love, Jesus and poor. As with most transcription done in class, it is not surprising that Jesus fell into this list. We know that Tippett became a religious man and changed himself. This tool just allows us to see his other most frequent words.

Click on the image to view the Collocates

The Collocates tool allows us to see words that were connected and most frequently used in the range of each other. He used “poor” and “heart” together many times to refer to himself. He used “love” and “Jesus” to show that he loved Jesus and in return he knew Jesus loved him, no matter how much he had sinned in the past.

Click on the image to view the Trends

If we look at this relative frequency trend, we can see similar patterns to ones we see in the two previous tools. We see that soon after he starts using “Jesus” or “Christ”, he starts to use “love”. We can see the trends of the frequency of the most frequent words. His usage of “time” or “times” does not appear to correlate with other words most frequent words, but they do appear with less used words.

We transcribed Samuel Tippett’s writing and digitalized it. Using this digital edition of the writing, we analyzed it to conclude that turning to religion turned Tippett’s life around. He became a happier person and seemed to have found a purpose in life being a follower of Christ.