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Blog #2

Memoir Summary:

Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir is an account of her life, (February 6, 1717 – May 9, 1799) which she dictated to her son. She starts out by talking about her childhood, as far back as she can remember. Her parents were very strict, and were of the Presbyterians persuasion. Elizabeth was the youngest of her sisters, and had no brothers. Her father died when she was twelve which left her mother to care for them alone. Elizabeth became much more involved in religion around this time and practiced it regularly throughout her teenage life. When she was twenty two years old, she started school keeping. Shortly after this she met her husband, who was a member of the church of England, and they had a son together. On February 22, 1748, when her husband was only twenty nine years old, he died. Elizabeth, much like her mother, was now a widow and had to care for her baby son, in the middle of her second pregnancy. She explained how she managed to handle this, by turning to God when she felt overwhelmed, and making sure her children worshipped God to reap his benefits. Her oldest son William died after a long illness when he was seven years old. In 1756, she moved to Dukenfield as a member of the Brethren church, where she eventually started up a school for girls. About ten years later when her youngest son was old enough to live on his own, he left Dukenfield for Fulneck, where he eventually would get married and be asked to start a school for the Brethren society. Elizabeth Grundy also had a daughter, who after her first delivery passed away, and the child died with her. After this she went to live with her son in 1787, and began a school for girls where she lived out the rest of her days worshipping her Savior.

The full compiled transcription that I entered into Voyant is one document that consists of 4,979 total words, and 1,314 unique word forms. The vocabulary density of my group’s document is 0.264, and the average words per sentence in this document is 28.6 words. The five most frequent words in the corpus are savior, time, god, son, and jesus. Savior almost always comes after “our”, and contains either the words god, jesus, or christ before or after it is used. Time usually comes right after a set of words such as “about this”, “at this”, “at any”. God is used mostly around the word “people”. Son almost always comes after the words “her” and “my”, and occasionally “the”. Jesus is often surrounded by the words Christ, Lord, and Savior in this document.

The research question my group and I are investigating is, how does the frequency of key terms change throughout the document?

The first tool I used to visualize my text is called TextualArc. I chose to start with this one because it was mentioned in Whitley’s article, and I wanted to figure out what its purpose was. The creator of this tool W. Bradford Paley, wrote that he wants “to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing”(Whitley, 197). This tool is interactive and as you hover your cursor over all the different words in the ellipse, lines will pop up connecting to its collocates. This ellipse contains every word that is used in the document, and the cloud in the center of the ellipse is a color coated array of the text’s most frequently used words. The words in the middle are used commonly throughout the entire document, while the words on the boundaries of the ellipse are specific to certain segments of the document.

TextualArc is helpful in figuring out which terms in the document are used the most frequently, and throughout the entire text. Without a tool like this, it would be a very long process to figure out the most frequently used terms, and what their collocates are. Which is exactly what Whitley was referring to when he said “the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be”(Whitley, 188).

 

Word clouds have proven to be quite popular with internet users, both for their playful aesthetic quality and for their practical ability to visually identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts”(Whitley, 198). I like word clouds because of how simple but effective they are. These to me are basically condensed summaries of texts. Instead of writing out a couple paragraphs to explain what happened in a text, you can just look at the most frequently used terms organized randomly, and be able to gain a little bit of insight to what the text was about. Obviously you won’t be able to actually understand any of the details that go on in a text, but it will give you a decent overview of what the text is about.

This graph uses trends to visualize how often the most frequently used terms appear throughout the document. According to the data, the word savior was the most used term in the first two segments of the document, as well as the fifth, sixth, and eighth. Son was the most used word in the third and the tenth segments. God is the most used word in the fourth segment. Time is the most used word in the seventh and ninth segments of the document. This graph directly shows us how the key terms change over the course of the text my group and I created. This answers our research question because its shows us that although savior is the most frequently used word in the document, it is not the most frequently used word in each segment of the document, or throughout the document. It actually changes throughout the document, but the overall highest used word savior. If I was going to try and figure out all of the data by myself without the use of technology, it would mean counting by hand the 4,979 words in the document, and figuring out how many times every word is repeated if it is. It would be extremely tedious and difficult. These tools allow us to create helpful visualizations out of texts very efficiently, and they show us a lot about the relationships between different types words and their frequencies.

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Blog #2

Blog #2: On Distant Reading

As I previously mentioned in Assignment 1, the Memoir of Harriett Lees was about the life of a woman, Harriett Lees. Lees died on January 17th, 1842 at age thirty and was very sick with a bad cough and lung inflammation up until her death. Faith, the Saviour and the Church were extremely important to her because she was brought up learning the principles of the Church of England. She was born on February 11th, 1811 at the Woodford cum Membris in Northampton county. She often cited the Bible and was very moved by spirituality. Lees lost her brother which was extremely devastating to her. She would go to church often to talk with and pray to him and knew that they would soon be reunited. She was often sick and suffered from bad coughs and lung issues. Specifically, in the spring of 1837, she suffered from lung inflammation and was told to go to Lemington to try the water there, and it helped her temporarily. Lees was married on June 4, 1838 to 13th Brother William Lees of Leominster. After she got married, she was admitted to be a member of the Brn’s Church and became a regular at the Church. The following December, Lees had a son, but became sick again not much later. Near her death, she lost her sister which was devastating to her and caused a lot of anxiety. She continued to work for the church as long as she could and often attended services when she was well enough to do so. She gave birth to a second son and seemed to be feeling well after she had him, but that did not last very long. She continued to decline and was worried how this would effect her baby, but she continued to look to her Saviour for help and support. She stuck with her faith, even until the end and helped those in need as much as she could. She passed away leaving behind a husband, siblings, children, and friends.

The research question Paige and I came up with based off our interest in Harriett Lees’ life was: what is the typical language of a married sister in the Moravian Church?

I believe that using Voyant was very helpful in answering our research question. Voyant highlighted the key terms in the memoir of Harriett Lees which gave us insight on what her life was like and what was important to her. I saw how important the Savior was to her based on how frequently the word “Saviour” was used. I also realized how the women in the choir referred to one another as sister because I saw that the word “sister” was used many times and I was able to see the context it was presented in. After visualizing the data with Voyant, I wanted to learn more about the Moravians and came up with new questions. I want to know what a typical life is of a married sister in the Moravian Church and then I want to be able to compare it to the life of an unmarried woman from the same time period and location and see the differences. These questions that emerged through my use of Voyant stem from Johanna Drucker’s definition of visualization in the Whitley readings. She defined visualization as a tool that can provoke or inspire many questions instead of just answering one specific question.

After putting the text into Voyant, I learned that the Harriett Lees Memoir has 2,099 total words and 731 unique word forms. I find this very interesting because a high percentage of words used were not used more than once showing me that Lees was well-versed and most likely well-educated. Each sentence averaged about 80.7 words, which is also very high and affirms the idea of Lees being educated as a high average sentence length symbolizes a high education level. Another piece of data that Voyant provided me with was that the five most frequently used words (excluding stop words) in Lees’ memoir were: sister, time, savior, great, strength. I feel that because Lees used these words so often, they must have been ideas or things that were of much importance to her, which goes along with my idea that she looked toward her Saviour for strength. The word “sister” was very prevalent because that is what she was referred to by others and what women in the Church referred to one another as. Also because the text is a memoir and she went through major events in her life, it makes sense that “time” was a frequently used word.

In order to get the distinctive words and their collocates from the Harriett Lees memoir, I uploaded the Memoir of Br John Willey into Voyant. I found that the distinctive words in the Lees memoir were: tho, fit, partner, oh, and lees. Out of these five words, “partner” is the most important for my research because it answers the question we proposed. A married Moravian women most often used the word “partner” which makes complete sense. It was used in the context of discussing the relationship between Harriett Lees and her husband. They were very supportive of one another and stood by each other in difficult times. Voyant allowed me to partake in distant reading, a concept from the Whitley reading. Instead of closely reading every text, I looked at the patterns that emerged when comparing the two texts. It made seeing connections easier.

The visualizations I made from Voyant allow me to practice spatial reading, another concept from the Whitley reading. Spatial reading is transforming text into forms that takes advantage of visual perception instead of just using typical sequential reading. It uses patterns and creates “concept shapes.”Here are links to the visualizations I created from the memoir as well as screenshots of the visualizations themselves:

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&query=sister&query=time&query=saviour&mode=corpus&view=CollocatesGraph

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&view=TextualArc

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=67f7a00f90e4fa7174f62b6c28f39208&query=strength&view=TermsBerry

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Blog #2

Nathan Ware’s Blog #2

My group’s project was to transcribe Esther Latrobe’s memoir. This memoir was a document written in script. After learning to decipher both the handwriting and general writing style of the text, we started to understand the life-story being described to us. Esther Latrobe was born on June 7th, 1802 in Bristol, Germany. She was the only daughter within a family of six children and was “tenderly loved” by both her siblings and parents (page 1). Early on, Latrobe was predisposed to a short life full of hardships. In her childhood, her first challenge was when she caught a deadly case of the measles. Although presently the measles is a relatively easy disease to cure with a high survival rate, such a disease was much more lethal in the 1800s due to a lack of medical resources. This sickness brought her to the brink of death, but with the strength of God, she became well again. A recurring theme within this memoir is her religious faith. She was brought up within a strict Catholic family. From reading this document, the reader can infer that through the many hardships she faced, Latrobe relied on her faith with God to keep moving forward. In fact, her physician always claimed that she had a shockingly high pain tolerance. To prove this claim, she also suffered from a rheumatic fever and heart problems that nearly killed her. However, yet again, she survived. The next devastation she endured was the death of her mother when she was only 11 years old. As the saying goes, nothing cuts deeper than a wounded heart. This wound scarred deeply into her heart, and she often wept in remembrance of her beloved mother. Nonetheless, through the acknowledgment of her friends, she felt the love that drove her to live on with her life. Consistently throughout the memoir, Latrobe looked to God for forgiveness, and then she reflected upon these wrongdoings to become a better person and strengthen her relationship with the Saviour. Even though she had deep emotional ties to the town of Tytherton, in which she spent over 6 years there, she went to Gracehill in 1826 to become a teacher at the “Ladies Boarding School”. Eventually, she went to Ayr and got married to Brother James Latrobe on the 28th of December. Later on, after going through labor for 4 days, she gave birth to a healthy boy on Friday, October 15th. Tragically, after living only 28 years, she died from illness. However, she honorably accepted death and asked her husband and other loved ones not to cry for her because she was now in the hands of the Lord.

After transcribing this document, we inputted our finished text into voyant tools. Within this transcription there are 8496 total words; of these words, 1809 of them are unique word forms. The most frequent terms are synonyms of the word “God” and also the collocates of these synonyms. For example, “Lord” is used 51 times, “Savior” is used 22 times and the word “God” itself is used 26 times. The word “oh” is used 37 times and is collocated with “God” 5 times and collocated with “Saviour” 4 times. The word “dear” is used 33 times and is collocated with “Saviour” 6 times. In the Bethlehem memoir transcribed by another group, they shared the frequent terms “Saviour” and “dear”. By comparing these frequent terms, the viewer can conclude that religion played an important role in the lives of the people from the 1800s.

All this data given to us through voyant tools takes us back to one critical question: What does this data and textual analysis provide to us that standard literature fails to do? “Humans are quite adept at perceptual visual cues and recognizing subtle shape differences. In fact, it has been shown that humans can distinguish shape during the pre-attentive psychophysical process” (Whitley, 193). In his article “Visualizing the Archive”, Edward Whitley explains how the brain is wired to recognize shapes and patterns.  

 

The picture above is a picture of the Cirrus tool from Voyant tools. Just by looking at this representation of the most frequent words, the reader can physically see the religious pattern of the text. Our group’s research question was: “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships?” Without reading Latrobe’s complex and lengthy memoir, our group easily got insight on the importance of religion within her life. Whitley also argues how digital humanities is superior to traditional literature in the sense of how complex text introduces the factor of the bottleneck effect. Although standard reading encourages the reader to pay closer attention, the human brain cannot sustain large intakes of information. When a text becomes too long, visualization tools and graphical analysis is useful. 

 

The visualization above is the tool Bubblelines. This tool spaces out the frequencies of the terms inputted and outputs them as a timeline. In this case, the input was the 5 most common words. Now the viewer would register that not only is religion a recurring topic but this topic is also consistently used throughout the entire memoir. However, as Whitley would agree, the field of Digital Humanities is not perfect. Sometimes, the reader needs the context of the story that only the close reading of literature can provide.

The picture above is the Knots tool. In this tool, you can click on any point of the lines and see the context in which the word was used within the text. However, by no possible means could you understand the in-depth life story of Latrobe from this graphical analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blog #2

Latrobe Memoir

Esther Latrobe’s memoir is about her spiritual journey with God and her expression of her faith. She grew up in the early 19th century in Bristol, England and went to school in Tytherton, England. She later got married and soon died after due to childbirth. She explains in her memoir how her faith strengthened during her times of sickness.

Voyant shows the word count for the Latrobe corpus is 8,460 and 1,793 unique word forms. Those metrics are useful because they provide the vocabulary density which is 0.212. This can imply the writer’s level of education and thus socioeconomic status because an education requires time and money. In this corpus, the density doesn’t seem to be high but Latrobe talks about her faith so she uses the same expressions and phrases that are very common in Christianity. Another indicator of one’s education is the average length of one’s sentences. For example, in this memoir the average is 24.6 words per sentence. This seems longer than average which makes sense because Latrobe received an education in Tytherton. Another useful metric is keywords which tell the reader about the main ideas of a corpus. In the Latrobe memoir, the 5 main keywords are: lord, oh, dear, god and let. The most common collocates for “lord” are “pleased” and “grace” which were on the left and describe how Latrobe viewed God and her admiration for Him. The collocates for “oh” are similar to “lord” because “gracious” is one of them along with “Heavenly Father”. This shows how much Latrobe respects God and His presence in her life. For “dear”, the most common collocates are “Relative”, “Mother”, and “friends” on the right side which shows how Latrobe was a positive influence in the lives of her loved ones. The collocates for “god” are “oh” and “Lamb” on the left to describe their need for God and the well known Christian metaphor of Jesus being the Lamb of God since he is sinless and a sacrifice for Mankind. The main collocate for “let” is “me” which is used in the context of Latrobe praying to God for humility and wisdom which shows how faith played a significant role in how she wanted to live. The patterns prominent among the keywords and their collocates is that “oh”, “god”, “lord” and “let” are described with adjectives that depict God above Man and are followed by words like “me” which shows God’s authority over the one praying to Him. Another pattern the keywords share is they are in every part of the corpus, in the beginning, middle and end which emphasizes their role in expressing the memoir’s theme of Christianity and family.

The Voyant tools most commonly show the frequency of words, the context of keywords, and the relationships of words using distant and spatial reading since the tools create visualizations to help the reader understand the memoir. Franco Moretti in the Whitley reading states, “large scale patterns of publication and reception provide ‘a sharper sense of the overall interconnection’ of texts” (188). Rather than close reading, distant and spatial reading help the reader to see the theme that connects all the mains ideas of a text. Another point the Whitley reading makes is the overabundance of information technology offers makes the traditional way of  “inspection, sift and synthesis” difficult because it is too mentally draining. Platforms like Voyant save the reader from wasting their time and energy (192). The reading also says, “the mind is just as capable of extracting meaning from shapes and patterns as it is at processing written language” (193).

Comparing the Latrobe memoir to Bethlehem corpus, they have keywords in common like “dear” and similar in theme like “saviour” and “sister”. Both memoirs talk about Christianity and the importance of family in their daily lives. Looking at the common key words, it seems like Christianity and family were core values for the Moravian people which is interesting to note because American culture today shares those same values but the religious aspect is more prominent in American politics than pop culture.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=99820e285c977ba05ea07cb9f2c61684