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Blog #2 contextual research

Grafton & TimelineJS Analysis

Blog # 2

Through reading Grafton’s Introduction, I learned that the two modes of representation are chronology and geography. These two modes immensely help clarify historical events, but they also obscure events. With regards to determining all there is to know about a certain event, these two modes help immensely because we know exactly WHEN and WHERE that particular event happened. With this, we can make deductions or inferences about why that said event occurred.

Timelines are actually less than 250 years old (Grafton 14). All they really are is a way of visualizing the numbers that we use to record our history, but they can also restrict our outlook on life. Grafton says “The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have” (Grafton 14). It makes time way more linear than it has to be and almost completely removes the flexibility of our concept of time. It has been hard to come to terms with these ideas and modes of representation, but I have done it successfully. By telling us a one-way story, they have told us a chronology of our perception of the world, but have also erased our opportunity to perceive time as a story.

This concept is actually extremely relevant to my group’s project. We were assigned the Bethlehem memoirs to transcribe an analyze. Other groups’ assignments were the memoir of one person, but we had several different writers to transcribe. So as other groups would have one coherent timeline for all of their events, we had 4 or 5 separate, overlaying timelines.

With this in mind, conceptualizing the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation was near impossible. We were just given seemingly unrelated transcriptions with no background. We had to use different sources to get a deeper understanding of what we read. For example, Professor Faull gave me a book titled “A Tale of Two Plantations”, which depicted the lives of slaves in the Mesopotamian slave plantation in Jamaica, and how the Moravian missionaries brought the Gospel to them.

 

Viewing the timeline as a rigid linearity would be ineffective, as there are multiple stories going on at once. Grafton says that our idea of time “is so wrapped up with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually impossible” (Grafton 13). The key here is flexibility, and being able to perceive several chronologies at once. TimeLine JS made this flexible view possible by stacking the different events on top of each other as they occurred.

Overall, using TimeLine JS made analyzing these events easier in that it gave a way to compare the events throughout time. This has given a deeper meaning to all of our separate work; it has integrated everything we’ve worked for together.

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Blog #2

Blog #2

For my group’s transcriptions, we analyzed the Bethlehem memoirs, which include memoirs about Joseph Lingard, Henry Unger, Anna Elizabeth Rauch, and others. Since these memoirs are typically associated with the Christian church, we wanted to find out what kind of impact the church had in their lives. Our decided central question is: Was the Congregation perceived in a positive or negative way in the lives of the Moravian People?

The manuscript that I analyzed was about the life of Anna Elizabeth Rauch. I had the first five out of the nine pages of the small account of her life and “departure”.  In these first few pages, Anna travels to Jamaica to visit her slaves on the Mesopotamia slave plantation. Throughout the manuscript, Anna praises God for her safe travels to Jamaica. She first started at Port Royal, and then retired to Carmel, where she came down with rheumatic fever. At that time, they didn’t have a cure, so rheumatic fever was potentially terminal. She felt a little better later on, and went to visit her slaves every now and then in Mesopotamia. Anna was really friendly with the slaves, and she also maintained a great relationship with God at this time. She became really weak in 1762, and eventually reached the point where she could barely move. At one point, her husband proposed her to go to Mesopotamia. She felt too weak to go, but went anyways, insisting she had made out with her Savior concerning it. In this last page of my part of the memoirs, she confronted to Charles while crying, and said her final goodbyes to him, because she knew she was terminal.

Voyant proved to be a superior way to analyze the transcriptions as a whole, as well as my individual transcription. Voyant was especially helpful in that the word analysis tools provided proved to be extremely helpful to me.

I liked the cirrus in that it gave me a physical manifestation of all of the different word frequencies. I also enjoyed the collocates feature, which gave the most occurring context of each word. One of the most prominent adjacencies was with “dear” and “savior”, which helps to convey their attitude towards religion. Whitney believes that “word clouds have proven to be quite popular…for their practical ability to visually identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitney 199).

Voyant’s Cirrus

My personal favorite way to analyze the text was with TermsBerry. This was a visually appealing way of analyzing the context of the most prominent words in the text. The TermsBerry consists of “berries” of different sizes with regards to the frequency of the word. When you scroll over that word with the mouse, it glows green and the words that are in context with that word glow up in red.

These specific tools would not be available for me if it was not for the growing industry of digital humanities. Before the age of modern technology, it would not be possible to perform such a vast analysis on a text this size in the same span of time. As in the words of Whitney “the forces of the digital era are rethinking the ways that read at the same time that American literature scholars are rethinking the ways that we archive large bodies of texts” (Whitney 201).With these means of analysis, I am able to draw significant conclusions about the text, such as that religion and the congregation are proposed with a positive connotation. It seems as if the missionaries genuinely enjoy their devotion to the Lord, and their life revolves an optimistic viewpoint of our Creator.

For the entire Bethlehem memoir transcription, my words with the highest frequency were savior(20), heart(18), dear(14), year(13), congregation(11), and brethren(10). Upon seeing these visualizations, I started to derive an answer for my central question. As in the wise words of Whitley, “The goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inquiry” (Whitley 189). The pattern that consistently emerges in all of the visual tools is the prevalence of all the ecclesiocentric behavior.

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Assignment #1

I found transcribing these pieces of work to be a very fascinating process. I have never completed a project like this before. I think that this project has given us an incredible opportunity. We have been given the chance to create digital artifacts from real journal entries. I found this project to be very special and meaningful. I really enjoyed reading the journal entries and being able to read them felt very personal. I imagined how long ago these were written and by who. There is something very personal about interpreting someone’s journal entries, especially for the first time. There were many deep emotions that were touched on in the texts which made me feel a connection to the work.

It was great to learn about these people of the Moravian church through their writing. From their writings, they seem to be very religious. It is unbelievable to think about the circumstances under which these entries were written and how different people’s lives are today. Reading these texts and transcribing them was a very intriguing process. It was quite difficult, yet allowed me to appreciate what I was doing even moreso. There were many words I was unable to read due to illegible handwriting and misspellings. Many of the words might’ve been spelled differently during this time period, but they also could’ve been due to human error. I completed the transcriptions through trying to decode words in my mind to the best of my ability. My group members and I often compared different words with each other to try to fully figure them out. It was helpful to get other perspectives on words from my group members. When I finally figured out a word which I was confused about, it was the most satisfying feeling. Completing these transcriptions almost felt as if I was completing a jigsaw puzzle.

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My works (4,9,11,12):

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000754

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000759

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000761

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000762

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Assignment #1

The understanding of how the transcription of a material document affects the researcher’s connection with that document. In my personal experience, transcribing the Moravian Lives piece in specifics the Samuel Tippet piece it was something that I had never done before. I have never completed a project similar to this one which is why I genuinely enjoyed doing so. It was interesting to me reading the work that the people of the Moravian Church had written. My group’s piece in particular was very religious and I’m assuming that this aspect was similar to a lot of the other groups’ works. I had never learned about these people before and it was intriguing to learn about them by reading their work and transcribing. It affects my understanding because it was almost like I was reading their journal or diary; it was a collection of their thoughts and at times it was super personal. There were also a few times because there were a few discrepancies within the text. Sometimes it was difficult to read and also there were misspellings. Perhaps this is how they spelled it at this certain time period, or just human error.

The process of digital text creation for my group started with dividing up who would transcribe what pages. After, we began to ‘decode’ in my mind. I would read the page and try to understand it best I could and later transcribe it. I would normally bold words I was unsure about or place a ‘?’ if I had no idea and check with my group partners after finishing the full page. I would tag people and places after I finished transcribing the page because I found it easier to do since the page told a little story and I started to pick up on words that were used often such as brother. I learned that this word needed to be tagged and was being used in a religious manner. After finishing all of my assigned pages, my group members double checked to make sure that all of our pages were both correctly transcribed and tagged. I felt that I had a connection to the documents because of how personal they were. For example, in some of the pages I transcribed the author spoke about their heart breaking and several emotions such as sadness and despair. I felt like I knew the character because of how deeply they were speaking and because I was rewriting their own words which no one had done before. The links to the original piece as well as my group’s transcribe piece are below.

 

Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

Transcribed Works Main Link: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit

My Work: (Pgs. 7,8,10,15): http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000757

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000758

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000760

http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000765