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Esther Latrobe Voyant Tools

In Esther Latrobe’s memoir, as the reader, we learn that Esther Latrobe was born at Bristol on June 7th, 1802 into a loving family of five brothers and two parents. As she grew up she battled many illnesses such as the measles. To add to Esther’s rough upbringing, her mother passed when Esther was eleven years old. She then spent a lot of time in a dear place, Tytherton. She still had battles with illnesses such as rheumatic fever, which often required the Lord’s spirits to restore her as her medical assistants could not. Because of this attachment with her saviour she put her heart into the Lord. She had a deep connection with her faith that developed from a young age into her adulthood. Esther Latrobe then gave birth to a boy which caused her to become very sick. The way she connected with the Lord made her fear of death simmer. She felt comfort with her loved ones by her side as she faded into life with the Lord, death. She died at the age of 28.

With the use of Voyant Tools I was able to, as Frank Moretti states “step back and look at the broad patterns that emerge” (Whitley 188). These tools allowed me to see the most frequent words as well as the trends in the text. These tools gave me new perspective on the memoir including a broad view on the answer to our research question. Our research question was how did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships. Seeing the frequency of the word “Lord” and “spirits” helped draw conclusions on how big an influence these had during this medical crisis of her life. Although it didn’t draw in specifically on how the Lord and spirits impacted her life as that would require a closer reading of her memoir, it was mentioned enough for the reader to realize that it played a big role.

 

With the ability of Voyant Tools I was able to see that the most frequent words were “lord”, “oh”, “dear”, “god” and “heart” (which is tied with “let” and “said”) respectively. Being able to see this showed what had the biggest influence in Esther’s life as she had the most to say about it. Even better, the context on Voyant Tools allows you to see to the left and right of the word which allows you to see the context of the Lord in Esther’s life. Being able to see every single occurrence of the word allows you to see much more than the human eye could pick up on. Also the list allows you to compare each occurrence of the word on a visual chart in a very efficient matter that the human could not do alone.

Using the available tools in Voyant Tools helps “identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitley 198). Word clouds allow you to “spatially read a large body of text involving an interesting back-and-forth between close and distant reading” (Whitley 200). Having these tools helped draw large conclusions about the text which mainly relate back to her beliefs about Lord. Along with Tippett’s memoir, the Lord impacted the lives of many of this time period which shows how important religion was. “Lord” and “Saviour” were frequently used in both memoirs. Using visual tools such as bubblelines, wordcloud, cirrus, bubbles, and frequency grids provides visualizations about the text without reading the entire text. Being able to draw conclusions helps analyze not only Esther’s memoir but also all Moravian memoirs and that time period as a whole. 

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Blog #2

Blog #2- Latrobe Analysis

Esther Latrobe was born in Bristol on June 7th, 1802. As a child, she faced many hardships with illness including the measles, but astonished doctors by persevering. At age 11 she lost her mom, and remained the only woman in her family along with her six brothers. She spent some of the best years of her life in Tytherton.  She taught for a while at the Ladies Boarding School in Tytherton; after her teaching stint she became devoted to the lord and spread his teachings.  She devoted her heart and soul to our saviour. She was also married and became the mother of a healthy boy. Shortly after giving birth she became severely ill and could not recover. She was not afraid of death and comforted her loved ones on her own death bed. She remained a happy spirit and had faith that she was joining the Lord. She was 28 when she passed away in the company of her husband, her baby boy, and other loved ones.

Contexts lets us see a handful of words to the left and right of the given term to see how the term is used in the document

Our research question is: how did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships? Our approach of using Voyant can help us look at the research question to a certain extent, but I don’t think it can help us completely answer it. We can use these “visualization tools as a component in a larger interpretative process” (Whitley 189). For example, using tools like contexts or collocates allows us to see the surrounding text around words like “saviour” or “lord”. This could help us get a sense of how Esther viewed God throughout her life. Also, using cirrus could help see the most frequently used words, which will show us if topics like God and Lord are important throughout the whole text.  Tools like this are quicker and more direct than using more traditional humanistic means. However, in order to completely grasp how Esther’s hardships in life connected her with God I think it would be beneficial to look at the text through a closer reading. Like the Whitley reading points out, one way to analyze our text is to “step back and look at the broad patterns that emerge” (Whitley 188), but our research question might require looking at more detail. According to voyant, there are 8,460 total words and 1,793 total unique words in Esther Latrobe’s memoir. The most frequent words include “oh”, “lord”, “dear”, “god”, “let” and “saviour”. When looking at words like “lord” and “god” many of the collocates tend to be verbs suggesting that God plays an active role in Esther’s life.

The mandala tool shows key terms between the Latrobe and Tippett document

There were patterns across all texts like themes of religion and faith in God. For example, looking at Samuel Tippett’s memoir there were similar frequently used words like “saviour”, “lord”, and “dear”.  This shows that religion was a significant part of both of their lives. In contrast Tippett also focused on “time” and “love” whereas Latrobe seemed to devote more of her short life to her faith.

The cirrus tool creates a word cloud of the most frequently used words in the text

Using the tools Cirrus, trends, micro search, and bubble lines we can see certain patterns like the distribution of the words throughout the documents and the high frequency that these words appear. Platforms like voyant truly  “make visualizations function as interfaces in an iterative process that allows [scholars] to explore and tinker.” (Whitley 190)

 

 

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For the Moravian memoirs the use of the Voyant Tools helps understand more of the idea or the theme of a particular text more easily in one website. In analyzing the text that was given my group has come up with a research question, “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships? ”  There is also a question that I propose and it is, ” Would her values of life be any different if she was put into this time period?” These tools may help us find the answer we need.   However, as Whitley points out “visualizations are intended neither to stand as definitive interpretations of literary text nor to provide direct answers to research question.”(187) 

When looking at the tools that are given it seem that these tools would help us understand more on these research questions. The reason is that many of the traditional tools are usually pen and paper that has only one copy of existence. But in the Digital age that we live, a person is able to access things more quicker and understand the connections of the terms and their usage in that text better and faster. We are able to compare and contrast between text better in finding the differences and “digital technology  (help us) search for patterns and trace broad outlines.” (188)

While using the Voyant tool it has showed the connections of the theme that was around the terms that were commonly used. The key terms that were most frequent in the letters were the Samuel text was lord, time, heart and death. These terms came from the other group that we shared with. By using the cirrus tool it allowed us to visualize the top frequent words in a word cloud. That shows a pattern of religion being the main center of it all. In the Latrobes letters it was about a women who has lived life of misery and sickness in her life, yet having a positive attitude towards her life and to others. Knowing that one day her God will give her a better life after death. With the cirrus tool and mandala tool it allowed me to distinguish the key terms of the Letters in a bigger picture. With key terms being lord, saviuor, dear, god and heart it conveys that most of these texts convey a message that a person life revolves on the teachings of Christianity and what keeps that person living as a good person. There are collocates in this text like, “Dear Saviour let me take my soul at the foot of thy cross,for ever having my eyes fixed on thy sacred body, bearing my sins’ heavy load.”(pg 6) with the Dear and Saviour being next to each other. For example, with the tool of Corpus Collocates it describes  the patterns and amount of times that terms collocate with each other. Being that the most collocate terms that go together are Dear, Saviour and Death. Even though Death is not much of a prevalent word in the Latrobe article. It did have a prevalent theme around it while also giving the same prevalent theme of religion being the main factor of her life. With the Lord being the most frequent term for both text, it describes her wanting advise from God to help her find peace in her life and those around her. One thing to note is that in this letter is that it had more of a emotional story of a person than describing the whole environment.  

In the end, the key terms and the patterns that were shown by the tools give us an understanding of their world and life. It lets us see the prevalent themes of the past that may be common for them, but uncommon for us. As  Whitley would explain it, “visualizations help us perceive patterns in data that we might otherwise miss” (187) in order understand the stories of our past.

 

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Blog #2

While transcribing my assigned memoir, I paid close attention to every individual word, rather than looking at the document as a whole. However, after my transcription was complete, I was able to read over the document and really pay attention to the actual story of Joesph Lingard’s life. My memoir is mainly about Joesph Lingard and his family and how he found his way into the congregation. The memoir discusses how Joesph and his wife were extremely unhappy and joined the congregation to rid themselves of this unhappiness. At first, Joesph and his family did not have a home near the congregation, so the brethren actually offered his family a place to stay until they found something more permanent. The memoir continues on following Joesph through all steps of his journey into joining the congregation. In the end, Joesph falls ill. As we move forward, I am excited to look more into not only Joesph but his family members, specifically his son, because they were so important in the memoir.\

Edward Whitley writes, “the virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be” (188). Whitely is correct in that information visualization tools, such as Voyant, make complex text, like the Moravian memoirs, much more digestible than they might seem at first. Our group research question is: Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian People? This approach has been somewhat helpful in answering our research question, but it certainly doesn’t offer a complete answer. This approach has been helpful in getting a better sense of how the Moravian people viewed the congregation because we have been able to pinpoint where the word congregation has been used and the words surrounding it, as I talk about below. 

Using Voyant has allowed me to interact with my assigned memoirs in a new way. TextualArc allowed me to see the flow of keywords throughout my document in a neat visual. This tool painted out a nice overview of the text, and “creat[ed] visual abstractions of textual patterns” (193), which I used before diving into other tools that gave more detailed data. In a way, I used this tool to see a summary of my document.  In my opinion, the most helpful tools on Voyant are those that allow you to see the frequency of different words in the text. Both the Cirrus word cloud and Document Terms allowed to see the frequently used terms in two very different, but equally helpful, ways. First, the word cloud emphasizes a frequently used to term by making it larger. Observing my word cloud, I was able to see that congregation, heart, saviour, son, and brethren were most frequently used. I did not find any collocates to be particularly useful because no words were associated with another more than once, so no phrases presented themselves as frequently used in the document. These words allowed me to see that Joesph Lingard’s story of how he joined congregation was more instrumental to the text than I originally thought. However, the Document Terms gives the quantitative data to see how many times each of those words were actually used in the specific document, but not the whole corpus. For example, Document Terms showed that heart was used 18 times throughout the text and showed a trend line. This trend line is an especially helpful visualization tool in that is shows me where in the text the word is used most frequently, which allows me to ask more questions about that particular section of the document. For example, where the word heart is most frequently used, Joesph was speaking about his journey to join the congregation and how the brethren offered him lodging. Joseph’s frequent usage of “heart” shows that these kind actions deeply affected him. Overall, These tools are helpful because “amid the chaos of more frequent repetitions,” the tools allow me to see patterns that I “may have missed with close reading” (191).