Category: final blog

Throughout Humanities Now!, we utilized several tools to become more familiar with our memoirs. My group (Sam Salazar, Brendan Matthys, and Olivia Smith) approached our website with a central goal in mind: to create a home that displayed the results of the programs we used to analyze our memoirs and centralize everything around our research question. Going into the final project, the creation of the website, I was nervous, but with the help of my group and the streamlined design of WordPress, everything went well.

In order to incorporate our research question-Was the congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of Moravian People according to our memoir? If so, how does it play into their lives?- and truly centralize our website around it, we put it on our homepage. When looking at our

website, I think of a tree of knowledge with the research question along with a short abstract as the base and each tab a branch, each stretching out the base’s central question/idea. With this design, the reader is able to navigate back to the home page from any tab if they need reminded of our research question.

 

The first tab of our website introduces us, the transcribers, to the reader. I think this is one

of the most interesting parts of the website because not only do the descriptions give the reader a sense of our backgrounds and interests but they also show that really anyone can do this work. Each of the people in my group, including me, have different interests and experience, and this tab shows that diversity, which I feel is very important to understanding the way we chose to approach our memoirs and how we worked together to produce the website.

Another one of my favorite parts of this website is how fun and easily navigable it is. We present our memoirs the same way they were presented to us in each process we went through, bringing the reader along the journey we went through before creating this website. Some parts, such as the Timeline and StorymapJS portions, are interactive, which allows the reader to  better understand the memoirs just as we did from each process we went through. As Grafton states, “We get them, our students get them, [timelines] translate wonderfully from weighty analytic history books to thrilling narrative ones” (Grafton, 10). These parts of our project make our work easier to follow and more interesting to not only humanities scholars but also to  those who are just exploring.

 

Another important part of our work with our memoirs was Voyant. Voyant allowed each of us to develop a better understanding of our memoir. Using this program, we were able to analyze word usage and the relationship between those words through visualization tools. Our website dis

plays some of these visuals, allowing the reader to experience our memoirs the same way we did. The cirrus tool creates a word cloud of our memoir, showing the importance of words through the frequency of their occurrence in each memoir. TermsBerry displays the relationships between words by displaying how they are connected to one another. The textual arc creates a flowing arc between each prevalent word as they occur throughout the memoir. Links analyzes the adjacencies between words in the text, and essentially links them together. These visualization tools play a vital role in developing a better understanding of these memoirs; they present data from the memoirs in ways that aren’t possible without a digital humanities approach. As stated by Whitley, “The virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be” (Whitley, 188).

 

Google Fusion was another important portion of our semester-long journey with our memoirs. Google Fusion is program that allowed us to understand the relationship between the TEI Tags we created in our memoirs in Oxygen XML Editor. Because emotion/health and placeName were the most frequently occurring tags across all of our memoirs, we decided to use Google Fusion to examine the relationship between the two. By doing this, we were able to better understand the emotional attachments to different places through visual tools that Google Fusion provided, such as fusion tables and networks. They also showed how important certain places were in the lives of the people of our memoirs. For instance, the fusion tables from Google Fusion made me realize that Benigna Briand experienced several emotions, both good and bad, in the city of Bath, showing me just how much of an impact this city had on her life. The tag frequencies we analyzed can be found under the “Tag Frequency” tab. In their writings , Drucker emphasizes the rich history and importance of visual tools, such as tables and networks, stating, “Almost all of the formats used in visualizations or information graphics venerable histories… The roots of tables and chart, calendars and timelines, maps and diagrammatic forms are old as writing and record-keeping.” (Drucker, 65).

Probably the most fun part of our website can be found under the “Moravian Music” tab. We found a playlist when exploring Spotify titled “Moravian Music” and thought it would be a super cool addition to the website. Through this tab, readers can better understand another portion of the Moravians’ lives, allowing them to listen to what they would be listening to!

 

I really enjoyed the putting together the website and all of the processes I went through with not only my memoirs but also with my group throughout this semester. Digital Humanities is a very important and emerging discipline that I’m proud to have been a part of. As Peter Burjan, Dean of the Humanities at Duke University, explains quite well, “We have people who can pursue new ways of thinking (digital humanities) and do that and have interesting results. Why is that a bad thing?”

p.s. Thank you so much for a great semester and introducing me to transcribing, something that I’ve developed a great interest in!

 

Website: http://bethlehemhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our website:   http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

In the process of creating our website about the life of Esther Latrobe and her contributions to the Moravian Church, we had to make decisions and compromises along the way as we learned more deeply about Esther’s life.

The first thing we had to agree on was the composure of our website: the screen layout, pages to include, and a header. Our primary goal in this endeavor was to make the site as easy to navigate and as pleasing to the eye as possible. We decided to include the introduction to the Latrobe Memoir as our header which reads “Brief- Memoir of our late happily departed Sister Esther Latrobe drawn up by her Husband & Brother.”

The first page you see when opening the website is our Who was Esther Latrobe? page. On this page, Esther’s life is summarized along with our primary research question. My parts of the assignment centered around research-based pages: The World During Esther’s Life and Latrobe Legacy. I chose to fix myself on these pages because I saw them as the most interactive and the ones that would allow me to learn the most about Ether while creating- also due to my confidence in my research skills.

The first obstacle I encountered was WordPress. It was something I had never used before and was almost completely unfamiliar with aside from the Humanities Now site. So, I made it my first goal to familiarize myself and learn the difference between pages and posts, how to manipulate the menu, etc. After doing this, I had a much better understanding of the process.

A lot of the difficulties we encountered were due to the nature of the memoir. A huge part of Esther’s life and memoir were her multiple illnesses that left her bed-ridden and near death several times in her life. While they were incredibly significant events in her life, her memoir only mentioned them briefly and in very little detail, so we were left to wonder the actual illnesses she suffered from and things like the length of time she was ill, about her recovery, and how she was able to miraculously recover so many times when she seemed to be on the brink of death.

However little she talked about her illnesses, one thing that was never left up to our imaginations was her emotion. Most of the memoir was comprised of her prayer and emotion about her relationship with god. Whenever her life reached a point which took a toll on her greatly, she turned to God immediately and allowed her faith to guide her.

Like her illnesses, we heard very little through the memoir about Esther’s family. One of the only actual pieces of information we had was the name of her husband- which actually allowed us to learn a lot more about her family: we were able to find the name of her son and learn about the life of her husband after her death (he went on to have 6 more children). Aside from this, however, it was difficult to learn much about Esther and her family through research.

The main issue in researching Esther’s life is the fact that the line of Latrobes that took part in the Moravian Church is hundreds of individuals long and are inter-related in a multitude of ways. Due to this, I decided that it would be interesting to have a page on the website dedicated to the Latrobe legacy that went beyond Esther’s lifetime and included some very significant events.

Another challenge that we had to deal with, not only in the final project but also when approaching the timeline and storymap, was the fact that the few times that the memoir offered dates, they were often given without a year and left for us to either calculate or estimate to our best ability given the information surrounding it. For example, we were given the date of her son’s birth without a year, at which point we had to do a few calculations and a bit of research on the Latrobes to find his birth year and name.

Something that was completely new to me in this course was the focus on material that was so untouched. By this I mean that the idea that we were the first to transcribe the Moravian Memoirs meant that there was very little information on the subjects of the memoirs as well as about the church itself. According to Professor Faull’s Moravian Memoirs: Pillars of an Invisible Church, following the 18^thcentury, each Moravian church member was asked to keep records of their lives in the form of memoirs. “From the mid-eighteenth century on, each member of the worldwide Moravian church has been asked to write a memoir, intended to articulate and preserve each individual’s path from a state of ignorance of grace to his or her rebirth in Christ” (Faull, 2017 ,p.10) It is incredible to me that there are a number of Moravian memoirs in existence that have been so little explored and interpreted. While it definitely made the research process a bit more tedious, it was amazing to be able to be the first to derive the story of her life from the memoir and discover new things about it constantly along the way.

Along with the unexplored nature of the church came a difficulty in finding images as well as information, and the places that Esther lived throughout her life also posed challenges. She did live in several places that are quite well-known, such as Bristol and Ayr. However, places like Tytherton and Gracehill were hard to depict using images; in fact, we were unable to pinpoint Tytherton on our storymap (we ended up pinning it in the location where it would be had it been labeled on the map).

The first page of the website that I created was the one about the context of Esther’s life, or significant things going on in the world around Esther at the time. The first challenge for me was deciding what to include in the page. While there were significant world events that occurred during her life, many were not actual influences to her and thus I decided only to include events that may have played a role in her and her family’s life. The events I decided were significant enough to include were The Great Awakening, the introduction and abolishment of the Penal Laws in Ireland and other parts of Europe, the Cholera Pandemic, along with other medical advances made around the time she was alive- considering the significance of illness in her life.

The difficulties I had in creating this page were mostly due to the fact that Latrobe spoke so little of current events occurring at the time of her life, so I was left to decide completely independently what outside forces may have been influencing her life.

The second section I did was the Latrobe Legacy page. I actually enjoyed creating this page a lot. I first had to do several hours of research on the Latrobes and choose those to include in the section. The first issue with this was the multitude of Latrobes that have existed around Esther’s lifetime. There were hundreds of Latrobes for me to sift through, however there were only a handful of whom made significant contributions to the world. I decided to include the remainder of Esther’s husband’s life, as well as the life of Benjamin Latrobe (a Moravian preacher), his son, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (arguably the most memorable Latrobe; who was a famous architect and worked on the US capital building and the White House), Christian Ignatius Latrobe (a composer and advocate of Mozart), and finally Charles Joseph Latrobe, who was the first Lieutenant of what is now Australia. The most difficult part of creating this section was doing hours of r

esearch trying to find the relationships between the Latrobes I included. Three of the men are directly related: Father and two sons, however it was virtually impossible to pinpoint their official connection to Esther with the multitude of family members to consider.

 

Personally, the most valuable part of the entire process of Esther Latrobe’s memoir transcription, manipulation, and interpretation was the ability to create never-before documented information and lay it out in a way that makes it accessible and understandable to anyone hoping to learn more about the Moravian church.

Link to our Website: http://leeshumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian Church, implemented the concept of having each Moravian write their own life story, which is something that I found very unique. He started the church because he wanted to create a community that stressed the importance of the individual and the individual’s role within the community. Zinzendorf wanted to be able to preserve the evolution of the Moravian Church so he established the concept of having every single Moravian write a memoir of their life because he felt each individual contributed to the identity of the Moravian Church. He believed that each individual had a unique experience and relationship with the congregation and with God, so he wanted the many different perspectives to be noticed.  We decided to focus on the question: does a single life matter? All semester long, we have focused on the Moravians and have learned more about them, their lives, and their beliefs.

In order to answer our question, we demonstrated the many different pieces of information that we learned about society, history, geography, people, etc just from the text in her memoir.

First, we utilized Voyant which highlighted the key terms in the memoir of Harriett Lees giving us insight on what her life was like and what was important to her. 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. We then took this a step further and looked at how women were treated in England in the past and how that would have contributed to Harriet Lees’ high education level. Voyant allowed me to partake in distant reading, a concept from the Whitley reading. Instead of closely reading each word of the memoir, I looked at the patterns that emerged and then thought about how this was applicable on a larger scale. The visualizations I made from Voyant also allowed 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.”

[iframe style=’width: 717px; height: 226px;’ src=’//voyant-tools.org/tool/Summary/?corpus=6116233b28b7b9aede5cfd3dfd08f2a2′][/iframe]

After, we then took the important dates in Harriet Lees’ life discussed in the memoir and plotted them on a timeline. Chronology allows us to see patterns and identify relationships between different events which is vital in both learning and decision making. We can represent history both with chronology and geography which is what is encompassed in the timeline that Paige and I created. Even though “historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored” in the past and it may seem simple at first, a timeline can tell us an abundant amount about the past because it utilizes both chronology and geography which are essential in representing history (Grafton 10). We then had to do research to get a better context as to what was going on in Leominster, where she lived, and the surrounding areas during the time she was alive. By looking at where she lived and important events happening there during the early nineteenth century, we were utilizing the geographic mode of representation. We then found that the Industrial Revolution, Bath Houses, and the tuberculosis outbreak were big events going on during the time period in which Harriet Lees was alive. After putting those events into the timeline,  we immediately saw the correlation because we  were able to use the chronological mode of representation. We saw how the events going on in Great Britain at the time intertwined with the struggles that Harriet Lees faced throughout her life.

The timeline was instrumental in helping us understand and discover why Harriet Lees went to Leamington Spa. We learned that in nineteenth century Great Britain, heath spas were seen as healthy places to visit and stay and it was believed that the waters there served medicinal purposes. Health was promoted by the introduction of spa waters, doctors, and parks and gardens (Royal Leamington Spa). Harriett Lees struggled with lung disease and was recommended to try the special water Leamington Spa offered. She went in the summer of 1937 and it helped her regain some strength and health, but she was still very weak.

Next, we created a map by plotting important places that Harriet Lees lived in or traveled to during her life. The map provided a spatial representation of a narrative because it was telling the story of one particular person. Specifically mapping Harriet Lees’ memoir has demonstrated how Harriet Lees spent the majority of her life and how she made her journey to Leamington in attempt to improve her health. Furthermore, through the Moravian Lives website and creating my map, I was able to see where other Moravians, specifically women, at the time lived. I was able to get a better understanding about Harriet Lees because I discovered what Moravian women at the time did and what their purpose in the church was. I saw how important historical events that occurred in Great Britain during the course of Harriet Lees’ life, affected where Moravians, specifically Harriet Lees lived. Even though London was the central hub for Moravians in the past, during 1811-1842 (the years Harriet Lees was alive for) the greatest number of Moravian women, whose information was in the archives, lived in Bristol and not London. I realized that this was because Bristol was a huge port on the slave trade, so there was a booming economy there. Bristol is much closer to where Harriet Lees lived, so it is very possible that she interacted with the members of the Congregation in Bristol. This directly relates to Bodenhamer’s point that “spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product and determinant of change” (Bodenhamer 16).

Another thing that we felt was important was that Harriet Lees was brought up in a family of individuals devoted to the Church of England, but she ended up getting married and became a member of the Moravian Church. After realizing how dramatic this change was, we decided to do further research into the relationship between the two churches and how the relationship would of been relevant to Harriet Lees’ life.

To convey this information on our website, we created a menu that listed the numerous aspects of Harriet Lees’ life that we further researched. On each of the pages, we explained our findings and how they related to Harriet Lees. We utilized contextual research, pictures, and the projects we created using the text from the memoir on each page to both verbally and visually explain all that we learned from Harriet Lees’ memoir. We made a page for each of the following: Gender History, the History of the Moravian Church, Moravian Women, and Tuberculosis in England. Each page consisted of our research, pictures that we felt would enhance our findings, and embedded links to the programs we used to help us obtain the information embedded in the memoir. We then created a page discussing the basis of our research question and explained why we feel that a single story is in fact very significant. In this section we discussed how we found so much about society, England, women, religion etc. just from looking at her memoir. We also made a page where we summarized the memoir so that readers will understand the original text we used as the basis of our research.

A problem we faced was that we simply did not have access to enough information to go as in depth. It was very difficult for us to find the memoirs of Moravian women in England during the lifespan of Harriet Lees. We thought that if we were able to learn about first hand experiences from other individuals, we would be able to get a better sense of the Moravians as a whole. By comparing numerous memoirs, we would also get a better sense of how significant each one was and if the information between them would be consistent. However, we were able to overcome this problem by utilizing Professor Faull’s book which gave us much more information on specific Moravian women in England. We also were able to conduct research on this topic and learned that during the “mid-1820s the sisters were involved in burgeoning array of organized charitable activities, including the funding of a seamen’s mission in Bristol, a Bible society, and missions ‘for the Heatheren’” (Dresser 313). We realized that these were the same activities Harriet Lees engaged in when she was a member of the Moravian Church.

Another page that we created on our website consists of all the work with the memoir and research that we conducted throughout the entire semester. We listed each program we used and how we analyzed the memoir using that program. Then, we provided a link to the actual research we conducted using that platform so that the readers of our blog have an even better understanding of the process we utilized to come to our conclusions.

We strongly feel that an individual’s personal story is extremely significant because there is so much information embedded into it. We were able to learn so much about society, world history, and the history of groups of people just from learning about one individua’ls perspective. We agree with Zinzendorf and see the value that an individual’s perspective is extremely important when looking a community because everyone has a different role and sees things differently.

Now that the semester is over and our website is complete, I am amazed as to how much we learned from Harriet Lees’ memoir. Not only did I learn about Harriet Lees and the Moravians, but I learned how to analyze any text I may read from numerous different perspectives. Digital Humanities taught me that there is so much more to a piece of text than just the text itself. There are so many pieces of information embedded within each word and each combination of a word that can tell a story. Going forward, I now know I have the tools to understand any pieces of information and I recognize the value of digital editions and digital archives.