Tag: 19th century

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Blog #2

Latrobe Memoir

Esther Latrobe’s memoir is about her spiritual journey with God and her expression of her faith. She grew up in the early 19th century in Bristol, England and went to school in Tytherton, England. She later got married and soon died after due to childbirth. She explains in her memoir how her faith strengthened during her times of sickness.

Voyant shows the word count for the Latrobe corpus is 8,460 and 1,793 unique word forms. Those metrics are useful because they provide the vocabulary density which is 0.212. This can imply the writer’s level of education and thus socioeconomic status because an education requires time and money. In this corpus, the density doesn’t seem to be high but Latrobe talks about her faith so she uses the same expressions and phrases that are very common in Christianity. Another indicator of one’s education is the average length of one’s sentences. For example, in this memoir the average is 24.6 words per sentence. This seems longer than average which makes sense because Latrobe received an education in Tytherton. Another useful metric is keywords which tell the reader about the main ideas of a corpus. In the Latrobe memoir, the 5 main keywords are: lord, oh, dear, god and let. The most common collocates for “lord” are “pleased” and “grace” which were on the left and describe how Latrobe viewed God and her admiration for Him. The collocates for “oh” are similar to “lord” because “gracious” is one of them along with “Heavenly Father”. This shows how much Latrobe respects God and His presence in her life. For “dear”, the most common collocates are “Relative”, “Mother”, and “friends” on the right side which shows how Latrobe was a positive influence in the lives of her loved ones. The collocates for “god” are “oh” and “Lamb” on the left to describe their need for God and the well known Christian metaphor of Jesus being the Lamb of God since he is sinless and a sacrifice for Mankind. The main collocate for “let” is “me” which is used in the context of Latrobe praying to God for humility and wisdom which shows how faith played a significant role in how she wanted to live. The patterns prominent among the keywords and their collocates is that “oh”, “god”, “lord” and “let” are described with adjectives that depict God above Man and are followed by words like “me” which shows God’s authority over the one praying to Him. Another pattern the keywords share is they are in every part of the corpus, in the beginning, middle and end which emphasizes their role in expressing the memoir’s theme of Christianity and family.

The Voyant tools most commonly show the frequency of words, the context of keywords, and the relationships of words using distant and spatial reading since the tools create visualizations to help the reader understand the memoir. Franco Moretti in the Whitley reading states, “large scale patterns of publication and reception provide ‘a sharper sense of the overall interconnection’ of texts” (188). Rather than close reading, distant and spatial reading help the reader to see the theme that connects all the mains ideas of a text. Another point the Whitley reading makes is the overabundance of information technology offers makes the traditional way of  “inspection, sift and synthesis” difficult because it is too mentally draining. Platforms like Voyant save the reader from wasting their time and energy (192). The reading also says, “the mind is just as capable of extracting meaning from shapes and patterns as it is at processing written language” (193).

Comparing the Latrobe memoir to Bethlehem corpus, they have keywords in common like “dear” and similar in theme like “saviour” and “sister”. Both memoirs talk about Christianity and the importance of family in their daily lives. Looking at the common key words, it seems like Christianity and family were core values for the Moravian people which is interesting to note because American culture today shares those same values but the religious aspect is more prominent in American politics than pop culture.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=99820e285c977ba05ea07cb9f2c61684

 

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

The hardest aspect of the transcription process was learning to read 19th century British handwriting because everything I read now, whether it be textbooks or online articles, is in print. Although I learned how to read and write in cursive in grade school, it was hard reading a person’s handwriting because the letters were not always clearly written out. However, I do understand it is very difficult to write consistently, especially when writing memoirs that are 40 pages long. Another problem I faced was more technical because the pictures of the pages were blurry so it was hard to read the sentences at all. Also, I could not distinguish the different punctuation marks on some pages because they either looked like streaks of ink or other punctuation marks. Thankfully, Professor Faull had requested her colleagues to send clearer pictures so I was able to transcribe all of the pages. I realized it is crucial to have clear digital copies in order to transcribe and analyze any historic documents. Without clear documents, it is impossible to create accurate digital texts which is crucial for allowing anyone on the Internet to have access to information only scholars would have had without the digitization of historical documents. It was interesting to be able to read these documents because I think as a management student at Bucknell, I would have not had the opportunity to learn about the Moravian documents. It was interesting to read Esther Latrobe’s memoir because I would not have had the opportunity to learn about a Christian woman who lived in 19th century England otherwise. I was surprised to read the same phrases that Christians still use till this day like “The Lord Our Shepard”, “everlasting kingdom” and “he speaks, the universe obeys”. As a person who grew up in the Church, I never thought about whether or not Christians in the past centuries used the same jargon as modern day Christians even though the culture changed in reaction to society changing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JskmdGh4grdhqHksXQmYSCRA0D3VlchO1ceAMjTDobo/edit

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1-Rosemary Rong

1)Link to transcriptions of your assigned memoir pages: (P9-P16,8 pages in total, written by Willey)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOTUXh2VYeFLDoZfbqKbYCa9QtGikaS4gYO-hvPEmPg/edit

2)The process of digital text creation, your connection to the documents, and your process of creating a precise digital text.

After spending 12 hours on recreating 8 pages of 19th century England memoirs in digital version, I felt fully immersed in the environment of guessing the author’s thoughts and adjusting his style. The part which I transcribed focuses on a man’s faithful religious beliefs and his ardent curement as the man suffering from a severe disease.

 

The reason why I chose this piece of memoir is that its handwriting is similar to old-fashioned pirate treasure maps on yellowed parchment which were created at the same time in history. However, the first problem I encountered is that several pages are completely blurred. I acquired for clearer version and in a week, Prof. Faull sent our team a much clearer version recopied from an England archive library. Thanks to large computer screens, I edited my transcription and looked up words in the online dictionary on the same screen. With Carrie’s help and online tools like Google translate and Wiki, I have learned to identify words with high frequency like “were,” “by,” “task,” “removed,” and old places names like “Cootehill,” “Mirfield,” and “Ballinderry.” Beyond the first rough transcription, I revised my 8 pages for 4 hours in two days to correct word spellings and sentence grammar. For example, I looked up “to recover quickly” in Chinese when I realized that page 12 is mainly talking about a man is suffering from severe sickness and was looking for related words to replace the words that I did not understand.

 

During the last process, I managed to reduce my transcription from dozens of confusing words down to one or two. At the same time, I marked up all the places and names. For 30 minutes, I finished up checking all my transcription again and read through all the 8 pages together to generate the whole idea of this part of memoir.