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The Final Blog Post

To begin, this was a long and interesting journey in making the Esther Latrobe memoir into many things like the transcription, the timeline, a story map and etc. All of these things that the class did was pretty unique and once in a lifetime experience. However, there were some difficulties in making this all happen. An example can be on the first time the whole class started doing transcriptions on the memoir they all received, and how most of our pages were so blurry that no know could transcribe it. Luckily we had a person named Lorraine Parsons who is a Librarian and Archivist at Church House at the London Headquarters of the Moravian Church in the British Province. She was able to get high quality pictures of Esther Latrobe memoir in a matter of days, which were really clear to see.  

To begin, in doing our website, my group wanted something appeal to the eye when visiting the site itself. In order to that we had to come has a group to see what fits to our style and to theme of our memoir. We played around with the website for a bit and tried to see how everything worked for all us, but in choosing our theme to our website in the first day of this assignment the website did not work properly at all. Luckily we had the help Carrie every time we needed help with technology. Once the website problem was finally fixed (which was to get a new theme for the website) we had game plan in what had to do for it. Each member of our team was dedicated to a specific part of the website. One of the task was to included a summary so people could get some background information on Esther’s life and to add our research question and conclusions so people who visited our site would be able understand what our main objective was throughout the whole semester. Each member of my team did amazing in their part in making the website beautiful for many people to see for the future. Also,  having the the opinions from other people that are not from our group were essential to have because even as a group we can make mistakes as a whole in our website and one doesn’t realize that there is one.

These were all the artifacts that my group used in analyzing the memoir: Transcription Desk, Oxygen XML Editor 20.1, Voyant, Timeline, Story Map, Digital Edition, Website. With using Oxygen especially, the process of marking up the transcription that my group made affected our understanding of the text in many levels into understanding it how one would analyze the text. Because there are many things to consider in the sense in what we had categorize as what. For example “God” or “Lord,” these words can have different meanings to it because many people have different opinions on this subject. Is “God or Lord” a human being, is it a thing or is it an idea for many people. There are so many ideas that one has to contemplate to mark it.

Overall, The process of collaborating as an editorial board with my group also changed our understanding of how edited texts are produced. When collaborating with my group one had to keep in mind in we needed to do as a whole. “Decisions about what one should encode and should not encode are to be determined according the purpose of our encoding.” (Pierazzo 469)

As I explained in another blog post, in the memoir that my group worked one there were not many dates on the life of Esther Latrobe. In doing her story map and the timeline of Esther Latrobe it was mostly about the sicknesses she faced during her life, how she always prayed for god for forgiveness and etc. This relates back to our research question which was, “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships?” The reason we choose this as our question is that as a group we noticed that Esther was very devoted to her religion and she unfortunately spent most of her short life ill.

Also, there was a comment from one of my group members that got us thinking how the traveling information is not represented in the timeline or in the memoir. It does tells us where she goes, but it does explain how long it took to get there, the method she got there and her experiences she had to face when journeying to a place. Latrobe journey consisted of her being born in Bristol, England in 1802 then moving Tytherton, England in 1820. Later on moving to Gracehill, Ireland to become a teacher and finally settling in Ayr, Scotland where she died in peace.  This journey she had must have been a long one for her because in the age of existence she did not the luxury that many humans have now in getting to one place to another.

Furthermore, this whole timeline lets us perceive the journey one takes in ones own life. However, this timeline has its own limits in how one can convey the journey of someones life with limited amount of information that was given in our memoir for Esther Latrobe. “Each artifact (memoir, timeline and etc)  would constitute a separate record anchored in time and space, thus allowing us to keep them in a relationship, and each layer would contain the unique view overtime of an individual or a social unit.” (Bodenhamer 27)  With that in mind one can never know exactly how things truly happen to a specific person like Esther Latrobe. One can never know if she actually took a regular boat to go Ireland or Scotland, she might have swam all the way there or gone with pirates because this was an era of pirates.

In the end, one can learn a lot from other people especially from one’s own team, from other teams, from professors  and even Esther Latrobe. Even though she had a short lived life, she kept persevered to live on everyday with the intent of helping others and loving those around her. I am glad to have read her story because it made me relearn about life again.

http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/digital-edition-2/

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Final Blog

For my final blog of the semester and class, I will be discussing the process of our final project. Our final project is a website on WordPress and it explains our complete process of transcribing the memoir of Elizabeth Grundy. We explained all of the tools we used to complete it, and how it answered our research question, “Were there different relationships between allegiance to family and allegiance to the church in Moravian lives?”. My group, Mitch, Meg, Caleb, and I worked extremely hard in order to answer this question, and I think we did a good job at it, with the help of all of the tools listed below.

The tools we used throughout our project were Moravian Lives, Oxygen, TEI File, WordPress, Voyant, Google Fusion, and Story Map.
Moravian Lives was the first site we worked with, as this was our transcription desk. This is where the original memoir was and we had to translate it word for word. It was very difficult at first because it was written in cursive, very unclear. We had to look very closely at it and ask our group members for advice on specific words. Eventually, we got the hang of it noticing that the different parts of our memoirs had similar abbreviations that were hard to encrypt.


The next tool we used was Oxygen. This was the way we tagged the different words and phrases in the memoir. We tagged place names, role names, person names, objects, events, health, and emotion. During this process, we had to search through the whole memoir finding words that matched these tags. We tagged as many as we could to make the process in the future easier to do, comparing tags.

TEI Files were the next thing we used during our process. This included the tagged memoir we made in oxygen, and then each group member was given a file to put their tagged memoir in.

WordPress was the tool we used to put our final website in. It was a useful tool to show our work in a great way. It was a bit confusing learning how to first use it, we struggled to add and delete menus and post certain things, but it ended up working out well. Voyant was the next tool we used and that had very many aspects to it. It’s different components allowed us to learn a lot more about Elizabeth Grundy and her life.

SteamGraph was one of the aspects of Voyant and it showed us the key terms. It was a graph that determined the usage of the key terms and how they changed, throughout a passage. It graphed the 5 most frequently used words and had a horizontal line showing this. The lines were color-coded and they changed, going up and down, while the passage went on, showing how the frequency of that word changed. The more the word was used, the higher the bump was on the graph. For example, in the image below, you can see that at times the word, Jesus, is the highest bump, but at other times, the word, son is.

Another tool that is apart of Voyant, is Trends. This is similar to Trends where it graphs the key term. It graphed the relative frequencies of the key term verse the document segments. It had bumps in the graph as well, but there were points for each keyword, and when you hovered over the dot, it gave you the exact frequency of it. The dots were connected by lines creating the graph.
Graphs help readers understand data much easier than just reading something. In Matthew Jockers writing, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History, he includes many graphs such as ours, and it helps to show a better understanding of the material.

Another tool we used was Word Tree. This one was definitely my favorite. It created a “tree” with “branches” surrounding it. The keyword was placed in the center, and words that came before and words that followed the keyword were shown in the tree. After viewing the branches of the chosen keyword, you could then click on a surrounding word and view that word’s branches. This tool gave us an interesting view of the memoir and showed us how certain words connected. It showed us how before the word Savior, there was Dear, showing her positive relationship with her God.

The last tool we used was Google Fusion. This tool compared tags, the ones that we found while using Oxygen. Each group member compared two different tags, such as object and emotion. Once they were chosen, we exported a chart we made relating the two tags and put them into Google Fusion. It then provided us with cards, maps, and graphs similar to the word tree. They showed differences and similarities to the tags. In the image below, this showed the relationship similarities between the different words used in the memoir.

All of these tools were able to create the story of Elizabeth Grundy’s life for the viewers, without them even reading the whole memoir. As Johanna Drucker wrote in Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, “Human beings read sequences of images and make sense of them” (Drucker 4). People can easily view images and know the story. This is what these tools allowed for the readers.

Honestly, when I came to class the first day, I was very surprised at what this class was actually about, I did not think we would be transcribing, or using all of these different tools, but I was pleasantly surprised. I am impressed in how much of this information I remembered.  I did not expect to be able to do all of the things I learned, and I think it will help me very much in the future. Not everything came easy and I had to struggle through it but I am glad I took this class. It was very interesting and I learned a lot.

Here is the link to our wesbite:

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

 

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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.

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Final Blog Post

As Humanities 100 comes to a conclusion, I have been reflecting on my learning experience throughout the class. When I originally enrolled in this course, I did not know what my clear expectations were. Perhaps, a course with a lot of writing considering it is a W2 credit. However, on the first day I was astounded to how different it was from other classes I have taken in the past. As a junior, I have taken a variety of courses in many subject fields composed of professors each with their own teaching style. This class was truly unique from any other class I have taken at Bucknell University and I commend both the Humanities department as well as Professor Faull for opening this window of opportunity and learning to me.

Before this class, I had only knew one way to read any sort of text. I was taught how to read at a young age and as I grew older, I learned how to skim for what is important as well as annotate and analyze text depending on what subject and the purpose. In this class, I learned how useful transcriptions are, especially in artifacts dating back hundreds of years. Transcriptions are the most in depth analysis I have ever done. After several projects and assignments, I fully understand the memoir and felt like an expert! My group members and I were assigned Samuel Tippett’s memoir. My group consisted of Alison, Clayton, and Bhagawat. We were assigned a group in the initial first few weeks of class. Together we worked on Samuel Tippett’s memoir in various projects using completely new tools to me. Before this class, I had never used ‘Bucknell Blogs’ so posting our first assignment on the website in the form of a blog post was pretty cool to me.

Following this, we all broke up sections of the original document and allocated who was transcribing each page. This process consisted of reading the original text and depicting what it said. Sometimes it was difficult since the photographs were old, handwriting could have been a bit messy and also some words did not translate into modern day English language. It was helpful to have a group member reread and edit my transcriptions to make sure they were correct as this was crucial to the rest of our projects during the semester. The next tool we used was Voyant. Through Voyant, we were able to learn about the text in many ways. There were several charts, graphs, and lists of the key words in the text. Some examples include Cirrus, Trends, Knots, and Mandela which we included in our website. To go into detail about one, the Cirrus tool is my favorite. It shows a collaboration of the tools with the most used and important words as the largest with bright colors.  Our other projects were the timeline as well as story map. The timeline helped organize events in chronological order. It gave readers, visitors to our timeline, as well as us a better understanding and visual of his life through our descriptions and photographs. Personally, it is always easier to me to understand a text when I can “put a face to the name”.  Our story map was similar to the timeline with descriptions and photographs. An added element to the story map is that it showed the places on a map where he traveled throughout his lifetime. As one views the story map, it shows Samuel Tippett’s journey. The next tool we used was extracting data through Google Fusion tables. By putting words into a spreadsheet, my group members and I were able to identify the most important relationships. In our specific memoir, person name to place name was most prominent. However, in other memoirs people also had emotion as an important part of the relationship. Samuel Tippett’s emotions mostly stayed relatively the same until he devoted his life to God. This was the shift from negative to positive well being and overall happiness.

As I said earlier, through the many projects we have done it contributed a great deal to my overall understanding of the memoir. The included readings also helped me understand each project a bit more as well and I liked how each blog post coincided with a reading.  My favorite reading was Grafton’s “Cartographies of Time”. I really enjoyed and appreciated how it linked with our project. In this article, he describes the history of timelines themselves. This was eye opening for me because of how progressive and technology based our world is today. I had never given a second thought to not knowing the time of certain dates or events. It makes me appreciate all of the advances the world has made and it reminds me of the common phrase, “time is of the essence”. Which is immediate satisfaction and gratification for something to be completed which is prevalent in our modern world today. Also, Drucker’s article gave light to the fact that these tools were not always available to us. “Almost all of the formats used in visualization or information graphics have venerable histories.” (64) This realization made me appreciate these tools even more than before.

For this project, my group members and I did a bit more research on Moravian Lives to give our website the best possible design and the viewer an in depth understanding of Samuel Tippet’s life. On Jstor, we read “The Theology of John Cennick” which was an important character in Samuel Tippett’s life as well as the Great Awakening time period. I learned about Cennick’s lineage as well such as his grandparents and their involvement in the church, which is included in more detail on our website. Cennick had also had a realization to devote his life to God similar to Tippett’s. This movement began in the 1730s and was “the idea of secular rationalism being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale.” (History) This time period was also the time of the “Enlightenment” or age of reason. With this background knowledge, it was evident how important religion was to not only Samuel Tippett’s but the time period as a whole.

The design of our website was constructed by all of my group members and I. The homepage gives a brief introduction to what our website and memoir is about. There are several tabs that have a few subtabs. The tabs include digital edition, visualization, sources and about us. The digital edition tab has the original text and transcribed text included. The visualization tab homepage describes how the tools we used helped us in this process. Under this tab includes each of our projects as well as some of the important people and places. The sources include the readings that we used as well as a few citations. Finally, the about us section is a short description of each of us.

In conclusion, the website was a great way to wrap up all of the projects we had completed this semester. With these projects over the course of the semester, there were challenges but doing it in a group setting really helped me. These challenges came about for me because this was all very new. I’m not super “tech savy” . The first challenge that I encountered in this class was definitely trying to read and transcribe the original document. I was very overwhelmed at first and had no idea how I was going to be able to do it.  It tied them all together and was a final chance to collaborate with each other’s group members. For my group, we found it most efficient to assign each other certain parts and edit each other’s to ensure we did the best we could. This class was a lot of ‘firsts’ for me, and I loved the experience!

 

https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/great-awakening

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41179343?seq=7#metadata_info_tab_contents

 

Here is our website attached:

http://tippetthumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu