Category: final blog

http://grundyhumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/2018/11/

 

After finishing up transcribing Elizabeth Grundy’s entire memoir, my group and I created a website through WordPress which gave us the freedom to customize the setup of our site. Our group chose to divide the website into six main sections regarding Elizabeth Grundy, as well as all of the work that we put into analyzing her memoir. The first section is the “About” section, where me and the three of my group members all write a short bio about themselves so people are familiar with who we are and where we are from. The second section is titled “Memoir”, and it is a very brief summary of what happens throughout the Elizabeth Grundy memoir. Third we have “Moravian Women”, which offers up some examples of married and non-married Moravian women who struggle between balancing out faith and family. This is actually what inspired our group’s research question, and made us want to find out whether or not there were different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church in Moravian lives. The next of the six sections is titled “StoryMap”, followed by “Timeline”, and “Visualizations.” For the StoryMap tab my group and I explained the process we used to create our StoryMaps, as well as why they were beneficial to understanding our memoir. The “Timeline” tab is going to be used as a more brief StoryMap, or a short summary of events that occur throughout Grundy’s memoir. Finally, the “Visualizations” is going to be the section where my group and I post screenshots that we have taken of either our website, or anything we have used to help us analyze Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir.

 

This is to give you an idea of what our website looks like, and how we chose to organize our data. The about section is very brief and is just meant to familiarize the audience with everyone in our group. One of the most useful pieces of data we were able to gain access to, is a book that was written by Professor Faull called Moravian Women’s Memoirs. It speaks on the lives of multiple different single as well as married Moravian women, and the difficulty of managing both your family relationships, and your relationship to the church/God. A large majority of these women would completely abandon their families to live their lives as member of a certain church congregation, which tells us that these Moravian churches were very persuasive and had a lot to offer Moravian women.

I was in charge of putting together the “Timeline” section of our website, so I started off by going back to my StoryMap that I created relating events in the memoir to the locations that they occurred. These events and their locations add to the analysis of this memoir by allowing us to see it from a geographical point of view. “Graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information”(Grafton 10). Reading a memoir is one thing, but representing themes, ideas and events from the same memoir graphically/geographically, allows us to get a better feel for what was going on in the writing. Combining event and locations, “will allow us to fuse qualitative and quantitative data within real and conceptual space”(Bodenhamer, 12). This is more efficient than it would be to simply analyze the events in the memoir without knowing where about they took place. This way of information visualization takes multiple pieces of this memoir, (that at first we may not even recognize) and combines them together to give us an explanation and gain a deep understanding of what the author was going through. “The virtue of information visualization is that it can make complex data sets more accessible than they otherwise might be”(Whitley, 188). Which is exactly what we have been doing throughout this class all semester long. We have used an endless number of visualization tools that have helped us analyze the text, and combine certain features of the memoir together in order to be able to truly understand what life was life for Elizabeth Grundy. Not just this, but also to understand what life was like to live in this time period for all Moravian women, as well as their friends, husbands and children, and other family members.

The most helpful piece of information in answering our research question is the book that Professor Faull wrote, relating to the relationships Moravian women shared with the church depending on if they were single or married. When simply breaking down and analyzing the text of Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir, creating a timeline that links together most of the major events that happen in the writing, with the places that they occurred. Before taking the time to figure out where all these towns were in relation to one another, I had no way to gauge how far she was traveling at times and how areas surrounding her were structured. Once I gained and understanding I went back to Grundy’s memoir and read it again. This time I was able to look at each individual event that happened in the memoir, and connect that event to a certain place that Grundy mentions in her memoir. I then began trying to memorize where all the churches she went to were located so I could see the smooth flow of her life, rather than trying to piece together all of her actions one by one.

 

When I started this class at the beginning of the semester I had no idea what I was going to be doing with these memoirs outside of transcribing them into modern English which took some time to get used to. It was so unclear to me at first what any of the visualization tools were for and if they were even any help in analyzing the writing. Now we are at the end of the class and it is obvious to me that if it weren’t for all of these tools (Voyant, StoryMapJS, etc), understanding this memoir would have been a much harder struggle, and these tools ultimately took two tasks and turned them into one to save you time.

http://tippetthumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

For our final project, we created a website to show the various aspects of the life of Samuel Tippett. To show these different aspects, we had to pull together everything we did throughout the year and do more research to be able to answer our research question, “How did religion give Samuel Tippett and others during this time a new life?”. When we though of this question, we were only concerned about Tippett but as we looked further into the time Tippett lived (1710s to 1780s), the places he lived in (Bristol, Kingswood, Hanham…) and the people who he interacted with (Wesley, Whitfield, Cennick…) , it was clear that there Tippett was not the only one who was becoming religious. He was not the only one finding Jesus as the answer to the problems he faced in his life. It appeared to be more of religious movement. It was in fact the First Great Awakening, which revitalized Christianity in Great Britain and the colonies.

To try to answer our question, we had to research more about the First Great Awakening, how Tippett and others related to it. We first reread what Tippett wrote to try to understand more of what he is saying. Although this reading helped gain slightly more knowledge about the life of Tippett, it was not as much as we were hoping. We tried to translate Tippett’s words to something we would understand but we realized that “no translation is complete until the original source is expressed in another language (Anne Kelly Knowles).” and we did translate it into a (programming) language (XML) so we could extract the data. During our markup process, we came up with group rules to determine whether or not something should be marked up.  We then gathered all the information we had collected. We looked through the graphs, the text visualization tools we used, the StoryMap and the timeline we created. All of these tools helped us visualize Tippett’s life and made it simpler for us to understand him. As Whitley said, “…the mind is just as capable of extracting meaning from shapes and patterns as it is at processing written language.(193)” We included links to and embedded the tools we used to visualize the memoire.

Then we decided to learn more and research the Great Awakening. John Wesley played a very important role in the Awakening. Although he was not a Moravian for that much of his life, he was greatly impacted the Moravian moment and the christianity moment as a whole. According to the Wesley Cottage site, he travelled to America in the hopes of turning the Native Americans to Christianity but ultimately left to go back to England, where he joined the Moravian group. Wesley, with some initial encouragement from Whitfield, started doing “open air” preaches, which allowed anyone and everyone to attend. His first (or second, as Tippett mentions) “open air” preach was heard by the working class people of Kingswood. Wesley was publicly against slavery during the time of the slave trade. Whitfield was associated with Wesley very early, old Oxford friends, and decided to preach. He preached for several different type of Christianity. Whitfield also decided to go abroad and preach there, but it turned out to be a failure so he came back and began preaching again. He preached more than 18,000 times.

To help us with organizing all of our research points, we used the extracted data to sort out the place and people name. On the website we described the more important places, such as Tippett’s birthplace Bitton and Bristol. We researched different places as well to help us determine how these places influenced the people at the time. Whitfield began his open air preaching in Kingswood. Bristol had a gathering of about 3000 people for one of Whitfield’s preachings. The images include in the pages make it easier to see and understand the concept of each pages easier.

As creating a website was new to us, we faced many challenges and we overcame most of them. Most of these challenges were because we were not familiar with WordPress and we had to figure out how to use it as we added new elements to our site. We had problems towards the beginning with pages vs blogs but we figured it out quickly and continued to work on the site. Another problem we ran across was the amount of research we did. We researched the relation between the people and places. The places Tippett stayed at throughout his life had a lot of history behind them and sometimes the research went too far in-depth. With the time constraints, we could not go too in-depth with each of the places he visited.
Our design for the website was simple and elegant. We created drop-down menus (as seen on the picture to the left) to make it easier for the users to navigate. We included all the elements of our previous projects as well as descriptions for them. We embedded our Voyant tools our XML extracted data, our TimelineJS, our GoogleFusion table and our StoryMapJS. We chose to use the map as our big homepage picture because the map shows Bitton, where Tippett is from.

The image above is also another problem we faced. I wanted to have a page like the Transcription Desk, where a user could read the digital and the original text side by side. I was not able to do it so we had to stick to doing one page for Digital and another for Original.

Through all of the tools we linked and embedded on the website, through reading the memoire, we were able to answer our research question as well as allow users to answer it by browsing around our site. Religion gave people hope that they never had before, it gave them hope for a better life and afterlife. It gave them the hope to redeem themselves, especially true in Tippett’s case. This time period also gave church access and preachings to the working classes, whereas before, listening to preaching was not possible for them.

The process of transcribing and analyzing Esther Latrobe’s memoir was an informative experience thanks to the use of various online tools like Transcription Desk, Oxygen Editor, Voyant Tools, Story Map JS, and others. The memoir provided a personal narrative (although some parts are third person) from a prominent figure in the 19th century Moravian community in Europe. Given a look inside Esther Latrobe’s life, my group was able to create a research question based on reading her memoir. We decided to answer the question: How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships? To accurately answer our question, we had to use various digital tools to synthesize and analyze her archival material as data which we later published in a digital medium as a website. The tools are explained on the website to recognize the important forms of digital engagement they provide because they encourage close and distant reading, temporal and spatial visual analysis, and a way to appropriately organize information to effectively inform and educate the public.

When my group was assigned Esther Latrobe’s memoir to transcribe on Transcription Desk, we divided the pages among ourselves and had to closely read our assigned sections to transcribe the documents onto the digital platform. Because the transcription process required us to read the photographed copies of the memoir word by word, we had to accurately transcribe each letter without making mistakes. However, we ran into some complications such as not being able to read certain words due to our unfamiliarity with British 19th century handwriting and blurry documents. After communicating with Professor Faull about the blurry pictures, she was able to request her colleague, Lorraine Parsons who is a librarian and archivist at Church House in London, England, to send better quality copies. Here below on the left is a screenshot of the editor’s view on Transcription Desk of a blurry page one and the image on the right is the clear version Lorraine Parsons kindly sent.

 

The transcription process is extremely important and crucial in analyzing the data to answer our research question because the transcription is “ a derivative document that holds a relationship with the transcribed document” which is the physical memoir (Pierazzo). The process of transcribing the archival documents enables a much larger audience to have access to the otherwise exclusive memoir. Thanks to the digital platform, Transcription Desk, we as editors were able to make the documents accessible as accurate copies of the original memoir and also preserve the authenticity of the original documents since the platform displays the original handwriting style on the left side of the screen.

Because we transcribed Latrobe’s memoir, we were now able to analyze the digital data with online tools to publish a digital edition and answer our research question because the ways events are recorded “represent a form closely calibrated to both the interests and the vision of their users” (Grafton). The memoir is necessary to make accessible because it informs the reader of not only the events but the context for how people like Esther Latrobe thought in that time period. The transcription would eventually lead to the creation of a digital edition which is the “formal (public) presentation of such a derivative document” (Pierazzo). However, before publishing the digital edition, we used various tools to analyze the data to answer our research question.

In the initial analysis, we used Oxygen XML Editor 20.1 as a tool to tag keywords such as names, places, and objects to identify overall themes and patterns in the memoir. Thanks to this platform, we were able to see that in terms of people, there were many proper nouns referring to God which highlighted the significance religion had in Latrobe’s personal life. However, it was difficult deciding as a group what would count as those religious keywords because some would be singular words like God or Saviour and others would be phrases like Lamb of God or Son of God. In the end, we decided to tag entire phrases if they were capitalized like the singular pronouns. It is important to recognize that editors “must have limits, and limits represent the boundaries within which the hermeneutic process can develop” (Pierazzo). It is not possible to be completely objective when it comes to editing because there are too many exceptions or unique cases to set universal standards or definitions when making editing decisions. Thus under our specific group’s definitions of people, we saw a correlation between God and her emotions as well as places. This is assumed to be the case because she described multiple times in her memoir that she felt it was a part of God’s plan for her to move from place to place and thus felt a variety of emotions in response.

We also used Voyant Tools to look at the word frequency to pinpoint keywords since it is logical to assume that the more important a word is, the more frequently it is written. The Cirrus tool creates a word cloud, the Summary tool shows the frequency count for the most repeated words, the Reader tool shows where exactly the repeated words show up, the Trends tool presents a line graph of the frequency patterns, and the Contexts tool shows the words in the same sentence as the common words to provide greater context. All these tools showed how words like Lord, God and Saviour had been repeatedly written the most, proving how much influence Latrobe’s faith had in her life. This resembles what the founder of the Moravian Church, Gregory the Patriarch, said about “Moravians as ‘people who have decided once and for all to be guided only by the gospel and example of our Lord Jesus Christ…’” (“A Brief History…”). It was normal in the Moravian community to devote one’s entire life to the religion.

Timelines give both text and images to show chronology and geography which teach the reader when and where events happened and what they looked like. For example, in the Latrobe timeline, there are slides about education and sanitation practices that explain the cultural context for the 1800’s in Europe where Esther Latrobe wrote her memoirs. The religious presence in Europe, “Anglican, Protestant and Orthodox – have been involved in the ecumenical movement from the beginning” (Member Churches).

Timelines not only record chronological events but also tell stories through the text and images of each event because “while history dealt in stories, chronology dealt in facts” (Grafton). It is chronology that is credible and shapes historical stories.

Story Map JS was another tool we used to look at the locations Latrobe mentioned in her memoir to put Esther’s life into context. Gathering geo-spatial data is a useful method for analyzing the memoir because it provides geographical context and a visualization of her recorded physical movement from place to place. Maps in general provide a frame of reference for the audience to understand the context of where and how people meet and form relationships. Given that she lived in the 19th century before cars were invented, it is rational to assume her main mode of transportation was by foot, horse, or boat. However, she does not mention how she specifically moved from place to place nor the amount of time it took her but Latrobe did not move too far away from her hometown, Bristol, when she moved to Tytherton at a relatively early age, most likely by foot. As she grew older and more independent, she moved further away to Gracehill, Ireland for a job as a teacher at the Ladies Boarding School which she thought was God’s sign. The map shows there is an ocean between England and Ireland so the audience can make an educated guess that she traveled by boat which requires more independence than traveling by foot because it is a bigger time commitment and traveling by boat is relatively more dangerous than by foot. She then had to travel again by boat from Gracehill, Ireland to Ayr, Scotland but with her newly wed husband to start a new chapter in her life. Her movements from place to place shows to some extent the progression of her life and her maturity as she accepts bigger and bolder changes such as studying away from home, accepting a job offer, and marrying her husband. Bodenhamer comments on the idea of change, saying, “Spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product and determinant of change” (Bodenhamer). The story map helps the audience visualize the stages of Esther Latrobe’s life, providing a “view of history and culture through the dynamic representation of memory and place… fusing qualitative and quantitative data within real and conceptual space” ( Bodenhamer).

The final presentation of our group’s analytical process is a website which includes all the tools we have used to answer our research question. It shows how we used each platform to analyze the data in an online environment.

 

http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/sources-2/

Works Cited

“A Brief History of the Moravian Church.” Moravian Church of North America.

Bodenhamer, David J. “The Potential of Spatial Humanities.” The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Indiana U P, Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN. 2010. 14-30.

Grafton, Anthony and Daniel Rosenberg, Cartographies of Time (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009)

Member Churches- Europe. World Council of Churches, 3 Jan. 2014.

Pierazzo, Elena, “A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions” in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2011. 463-477.