Category: final blog

Categories
final blog Uncategorized

Final Blog

For the first step in me and Jacob’s final project on John Willey, we chose to research how much agency he Willey had in his life. My first time reading through John Willey’s memoir, I read through i quickly and noticed he was very busy with his religious work. I assumed he was always very passionate about it, but as we looked at the memoir through other tools and working with it all semester I learned Willey didn’t always have a great sense of agency in his life. When you dig deeper into his memoir, it shows that his work was often pressured on him by his family or his church. Through looking at our timelines, story maps, relationship entities, and a couple outside sources we were able to determine where Willeys agency came from.

Before we actually began our final project, we had the opportunity to work on a snap talk, which was a great first step towards answering our research question. For this project, we developed an outline of Willey’s entire memoir, making sure we had all the information fresh in our minds as we worked on our final project. Additionally, we compiled all the resources and tools we could use to find Willey’s agency. Then we looked into each of those methods more to determine how exactly we can use them. This was where our deeper research came in, and we began our final project to determine how Willey’s agency in his life is influenced.

One helpful secondary source in answering our research question was Professor Faull’s book, Speaking to Body and Soul. This book taught us a lot on how Moravian Church determines the decisions you make in life. There is process which your decisions are made by a Bible verse you put into a box named the lot. Another helpful secondary source was the Yorkshire Families M-Z – 18th Century list, providing background info on Willey’s family. This source had his family listed out, providing information on their occupations, Church orders, education, Church service, etc. John Willey’s father, Michael Willey, and his mother, Abigail Willey were both extremely involved in the Church, leading me to believe that John Willey did not really have much choice but to be religious. Enhancing this idea was a quote I found in Willey’s memoir, stating that When John Willey was 21 his “father became laborer of Kingwood congregation about that time, he was frequently with him there assisting in the school in that place. It was here he was viewed with the Congregation” (4). Shortly after that, Willey received his First Communion, and began his involvement in the Church. I feel that had John Willey not been surrounded by his Father’s religious work he wouldn’t have went down that path, showing his agency in his life didn’t come from his own choices.

Through looking at our relationship entities that we developed using Oxygen, we were able to notice relationship between where a person went and why they went to that place. We also compared that with dates, showing us how frequently Willey was moving around throughout his life. He only lived in each place for a short period of time, and each was for a religious job. He was happy in some places and wanted to stay but wasn’t allowed to. And even as his health declined, and Willey begged “dismissal from active Service in Cootehill” (Wiley memoir, 13), he was forced to stay involved in the Church. Willey was suffering and had no agency for his work at this time, yet he was forced to continue his work.

Another representation of how Willey’s life was determined by the Church came from our story map. As Bodenhamer suggests, “all spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there” (16). Therefore, to truly understand Willey’s life, we have to notice where he was from. Our story maps showed us that Willey moved a great distance over the course of his life. He grew up in the United Kingdom, then was forced by the Church to move to Northern Ireland, never able to return back home. Willey was very happy with many of his jobs, but was forced by the Church to constantly move. This lead to Willey’s eagerness to work to lessen, weakening his agency towards his work. Additionally, many of the areas Willey went to were extremely religious, enhancing his pressure to work in the Church. Also, John Willey was forced by the Church to move to Northern Ireland, which was disease-ridden at the time, perhaps contributing to John Willey’s illness, which ultimately ended all agency for him.

One major difficulty Jacob and I encountered was actually developing our WordPress site. Unfortunately, we lost one of our group members in the last couple weeks, who had experience using wordpress. But neither me or Jacob were familiar with it. Luckily, our Professors were extremely helpful with creating our wordpress site. We have multiple pages, each depicting how a tool we used helped us to answer our research question. Additionally, we have our research question outlined, some background on the Moravian Church, the process of our project, and some background on Willey’s memoir. This is all online on a very interactive and accessible wordpress web site titled “The Life of John Willey”  I am happy with how our design turned out, and think our site does a great job of answering our research question.

Overall, I think my studies this semester have been extremely helpful in developing my group work skills, knowledge on Moravian Lives, as well as learning a lot of knowledge about Digital Humanities. As Whitley reading states, we are able to “discovery of the knowledge these archives contain.” I feel I was able to discover a lot of the knowledge in Willey’s memoir through the process of this class this semester. Additionally, I was able to learn and develop my skills with many valuable resources, such as voyant, wordpress, oxygen, and many others. The process of learning about John Willey’s memoir has been a great experience.

Categories
final blog

Final Blog

Overall, I was happy with how our final digital artifact, our wordpress website, turned out. It was a nice way to display everything we have created and learned this year about Esther Latrobe, her journey/life, and the different digital tools and artifacts we used. After some deliberation, we chose a simple and clean theme that didn’t have too many spaces for pictures. We wanted the focus to be on the text and on Esther. It was hard to choose a theme because many of them were picture oriented. But, we decided a great picture to display on the homepage would be the first excerpt from Esther Latrobe’s actual memoir. It includes her full name and the cursive handwriting looks elegant. We wanted this to be the first thing users saw because that’s where it all began for us.

Our homepage on our website featuring the excerpt from Esther’s memoir

We played around with the website for a bit and tried to see how everything worked. We included a page with the summary of her life and research question, an About the Authors page, a copy of her memoir, the transcription desk, voyant, TEI tagging, the digital edition, the timeline, the story map, contextual events, our research question conclusion, and our sources page. We used a couple of drop down menus along the toolbar so it wouldn’t appear too cluttered for users.

The editing process of our different pages and drop down menus

We included a summary so people could get some background information on Esther’s life and we added our research question and conclusions so users would understand what our focus was throughout the semester. We wanted to include a clean copy of her memoir so people could see the actual memoir. It is so cool to see the original document, even if it is in picture form, because users can see what we were working with and see how people wrote back then. The beautiful cursive is very different than how we handwrite things today. We also included pages devoted to the transcription desk, voyant, and TEI tagging so everyone would understand the process it took to properly transcribe and extract information from this text. I think one of the most important pieces was the digital edition, which is “ a derivative document that holds a relationship with the transcribed document, and [a digital edition is] a formal (public) presentation of such a derivative document.” (Pierazzo 2). It was so cool that we created the first digital edition of this memoir ever. It is easily accessible now; you don’t need to travel and dig through an old archive, you can just hop on the internet at your convenience. The timeline was one of our biggest projects so it was important that it be included as well. We were able to see her life as an organized series of events. It was helpful and easier to analyze her life this way. I also thought the map was very important too, because you could really visualize her life and see how far she traveled. When looking at the map we were able to find background information on every place she lived. For example, I used https://history.wiltshire.gov.uk/community/getchurch.php and www.gracehillvillage.org to find out information on Tytherton and Gracehill respectively, two places with Moravian origins, and two of the places Esther lived. Finally, we decided to have a page called The World During Esther’s Life. We felt it was important to include context and explain what was going on in this time period. We can look at the big picture and see how world events impacted one life. We embedded certain things like the story map and the timeline, and we included screenshots of other tools we used.

The Timeline page on our website

We assigned each other different roles for the website and one of my main responsibilities for this site was creating her timeline page. I chose her timeline because, “graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.” (Grafton 10). I wrote about the process of creating her timeline, the events we decided to include, and how it gave us a better look at Esther’s life. I added a screenshot and embedded the actual timeline so users can scroll through our actual work. In addition,  we ran into some challenges with simply formatting and navigating the wordpress site. For example, it took us a little bit of time to actually create the drop down menus. Luckily, one of our group members had experience with this program and helped us figure it out. Our research question was, How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships? We came up with this question after carefully reading her forty page memoir. We noticed that Esther was very devoted to her religion and she unfortunately spent most of her short life ill. So, we decided to put those two aspects together and analyze her life with this in mind. I believe that the digital tools we used throughout the semester helped us answer this question. Every tool we used aided us in examining her memoir in different ways and we really got an inside look at what her life was like. I thought it was helpful having the snap talk because it was basically all of the information from our website in a google slides presentation. I thought that our group worked very well together throughout the whole semester. We worked as a cohesive unit and got all of our work done. It was a fascinating experience working in a group for basically the whole semester, luckily we didn’t have too many problems if at all. Everyone was open minded and it was useful having five other people I knew I could rely on in the class. Every assignment and digital tool we used brought us closer to understanding Esther Latrobe’s life. 

 

http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu

 

Categories
final blog

Final Blog

The first step to creating our digital artifact, was figuring out our research question.  We came up with the research question, “How much agency does John Willey have?”. The question came up when we created our story map and also our relationship entities.  Our relationship entities allowed us to see how much he traveled, and when we compiled dates of each time he traveled we saw that he was not spending much time at each location.  Our group immediately wondered why he would spend only one to two years at a place, and why he did not have a stable role at a certain congregation. The story map also helped us see just how far the distance he traveled every single time, and the fact that he never returned home to England after being called to serve in Northern Ireland.  At that time there were no cars, so traveling that much would have been tiresome and irritating. We then started to pick apart the actual words in the memoir. John Willey was “called” to serve at congregations, he did not voluntarily travel so far and frequently. He also “lamented” his job was a laborer in Fulnec. The word choice of the memoir and close analyzation of the text really brought us to our research question.  

Once we decided on our research question and presented it to Professor Faull, she suggested we research the Moravian Church and find out what the actual role of laborer meant and how decisions were made.  I then borrowed her book, Speaking to Body and Soul, and found out necessary information to answer our research question. Moravians were assigned to four different groups within the Church; Single Brethren’s Choir, Single Sisters’ Choir, Married Persons’ Choir, and Widows’ Choir.  In these groups were members labeled as “laborers”, and the laborer’s job was to conversate with each member of their Choir in order to guide them to strengthen their personal connection to God. We also discovered that decisions in the Moravian Church was decided through “the lot”.  The lot involved praying over a dilemma, and then putting bible verses into a box and drawing one. Depending on if the bible verse was positive or negative determined the solution to the dilemma. This directly applies to John Willey’s life. John Willey lamented his work at Fulnec, when he was appointed Laborer of the Single Brethren’s Choir.  Now knowing this background information we can apply that most of the decisions in John Willey’s life were not determined by him but rather through the lot.

After discussing our question and figuring out our answer, it was time for us to create our digital artifact.  We decided to have different pages for each of the tools we used to answer our research question. The Story Maps we created is just one of the useful tools we were introduced to in class that helped us answer our research question.  The Story Map illustrates John Willey’s travels through England and Northern Ireland. This offers new information that the memoir alone could not provide. Bodenhamer states, “all spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there” (16).  When simply looking at the memoir it’s hard to fathom how far and frequently John Willey was called to serve, but looking at the Story Map really puts it into perspective. Just one example of how Bodenhamer’s statement and our research question play hand-in-hand when observing the memoir through a Story Map is when talking about Cootehill.  Cootehill is located in Northern Ireland and at this time the area was dealing with poverty and hunger due to the Potato Famine. This could explain why the Church sent John Willey there, especially since it is described to be in poor condition. This is just one example of how one of the tools in our digital artifact has helped us determine John Willey’s agency.  

I personally have never worked with wordpress and was very unfamiliar with creating my own website.  One of our group members seemed to be somewhat familiar with the platform but due to personal problems was not able to contribute.  This left Tyler and me scrambling, trying to figure out how to work wordpress and also how we would make up for the extra work we now had to do.  Professor Faull and Carrie Primann were instrumental in helping us create our website. Without them, our digital artifact would be unnavigable and our answer to our research question would have been very weak.  The snaptalk presentation was also very helpful, as it forced us to figure out our research question, tools we would use to answer the question, and the layout of the website before we had anything concrete. I think one of the most important things we did as a group was look for sources outside of the curriculum, like Professor Faull’s book and our secondary sources like the list of Yorkshire Families that revealed information on John Willey’s family.  

Overall, I am very pleased with the state of our digital artifact and think it came out really well.  It is clear and navigable, and I think Tyler and I did a good job overcoming some adversity and successfully answering the research question using evidence to back our claim.  When I first signed up for this class I had no idea what to expect. To me, the first assignment seemed so random to me. I thought to myself, “Wow the only thing I have to do for this class is read a random guy’s memoir from hundreds of years ago and type it out word-for-word?”.  As the course has progressed however, my view on the assignments and this memoir has changed. This memoir has become more than a document written from someone hundreds of years ago. Now this is someone’s legacy that I have helped to preserve and have honestly grown to love to work on.   I find it fascinating how much information can be pulled from the pages and how I started by simply transcribing a document to making a full website based off the text. This digital artifact is the physical manifestation of my progress in this course and I will miss working on John Willey’s memoir every week.  

Categories
final blog

Final Blog

After finalizing our transcriptions and analyzing them, we were able to create a website using WordPress. WordPress allows us to choose a theme for our specific website. We can then add different tabs for each part of our project. The different sections of our project consist of: about, memoir, Moravian women, storymap, timeline, and visualizations. In the about tab, each one of the authors added a short biography of themselves.

A short summary of Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir was provided in the tab labeled memoir. The next tab, Moravian Women, provides viewers with an analysis of Professor Faull’s book, Moravian Women’s Memoirs. In this book, many of the women speak of the struggle they encountered when choosing between family and religion. One of our group members analyzed the difference between single women and married women in regards to which they prioritize, family or faith. After researching the topic, we were able to find answers to support our research question, were there different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church in Moravian Lives? It was determined that single women tended to devote their entire life to religion whereas married women were able to find a balance between the two. Those who did not have a significant other had their life revolve around their Savior after joining the Congregation. For the married woman that was researched, her husband was a part of the Brethren Society. With this, he family life and religious life overlapped a bit; it was easier for her to focus on faith at some times in her life and family at others. This showed that there were, in fact, definitely differences in relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church in Moravian Lives. From our research, it showed that it tended to depend on one’s marital status, and if they were married, who they were married to.

Storymap JS was used to map out different places in Elizabeth Grundy’s life and connect these places to each other. We were able to see where the important events in her life occurred and find relationships between them. We could determine where her important religious events took place as well as her familial events and see if they occurred in the same places or ones that were close to another. We were able to see if she had to drop everything to travel far for something else or if things were connected.

There were several different visualization techniques used when analyzing our transcription and determining the answer to our research question. “A digital edition can represent many more features than a print publication can,” (Pierazzo 472). Pierazzo speaks of the many benefits of using a digital edition over a print one. The visualizations tab on our website contains many subsections: Moravian Lives, Oxygen, TEI File, WordPress, Voyant, and Google Fusion.  Moravian Lives was the tool we used when first transcribing our memoir and gave us our first glimpse into the amount of times she spoke of her family and the amount of times she spoke of religion. It was very easy to realize, after reading through the memoir once, that these two things were incredibly important in her life, and her entire life revolved around them both.

Oxygen allowed us to create tags on specific words that we felt were important in analyzing the memoir. Our markups were recorded in a TEI file. This allowed us to see the amount of times she spoke of her family, i.e. son and husband, as well as religious figures, i.e. Lord and Savior. We could also see the different places she traveled as we tagged place names as well as important events. Through the tags, we had the ability to see which tags were near each other to determine if there were relationships among her two allegiances.

There is a subsection called WordPress that explains the usage of the tool in organizing our final project. We were able to use WordPress to put all of our research and information in one spot to help viewers in understanding our research question.

The Voyant tool gave us multiple ways to find determine relationships in her memoir. The specific tools we used were StreamGraph, Trends, and Word Tree. When thinking of our research question, StreamGraph and Trends provided us with the frequencies of key terms used throughout Elizabeth Grundys’s memoir. We were able to gain an idea of how often she spoke of her family and how often she spoke of her faith, determining which was more important to her at which part of her life. Word Tree graphed connections between key words and their surrounding terms throughout the memoir. We were given the ability to see if there was ever an overlap between religion and family. “With the tools that are now available, such as Voyant 2.0, Antconc, Jigsaw, Gephi, it is possible to extract textual digital data (plain text files) from transcriptions and/or translations and quantify and visualize verbal patterns,” (Faull 18). These tools give us the ability to analyze texts in different ways.

Google Fusion provides users with an analysis between two specific tags. We could see connections between key words and ones that surround them through graphs.

Menus are embedded in the website to aid in the navigation. Users can access information through many different ways. Users can also search key terms in order to find information on them.

With all of these tools, it helped us answer our research question that there are different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church. In Elizabeth Grundy’s case, she was able to find a balance between the two. Her son was heavily involved in the religious community which made it easy for her to prioritize both, often at the same time. Even when she ad a husband, she still kept religion as a priority. She moved to some areas for religious reasons and other areas for familial reasons. As she was dying, the most vulnerable point in her life, she had her son next to her while she spoke of religion. This exemplified the importance of these two things in her life.

Our group did not encounter many difficulties throughout the entire project and even when creating the website. Our main issue occurred when trying to incorporate menus into our site. They were difficult to figure out at first, but we were soon able to complete it. Choosing a website design and adding pages was easy to do.

I really enjoyed this class. It was something totally different from my major. It was nice to branch out and study new things. I found it very interesting.

 

 

 

 

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