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Blog #4

Blog #4

As I started to mark up my transcription, I started to really put together how everything was interconnected.  At first I was simply reading a memoir and it felt like anything else I would read but marking up the transcription and highlighting people, places, and things like emotions made my connection with the transcription deeper.  When reading something casually, it’s easy to miss emotions, and especially when reading something personal like a memoir these emotions are very important. Emotions allow us to see what the writer was going through and can really put us in the place where he/she was when writing the memoir.  When really looking at the places, it’s really interesting to see where the people in these memoirs lived and traveled to. We can see these areas today especially places like London, but can only imagine what it would be like for them at that time. Lastly, highlighting each person and their connection to John Willey allowed us to see how many people John had affected through his life and work.  These markups have helped me understand these transcriptions on a deeper level and connect to them.

Our memoir in particular had three people working on it at the same time.  This meant in order for us to have consistent mark ups we needed to collaborate and decide what was worthy and what was not.  One of the main challenges that I think was prominent in other memoirs as well was terms like Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, Savior, Saviour, and Lord.  Our group decided to make Jesus the person’s name, and the rest all role names. This is seen in one of the screenshots below where I have “Lord” marked up as a role name.  In some cases it was harder for my group to come up with what to do about emotions. We decided that including emotions that was not felt by a particular person would not be marked up.  For example, in the pictures below we can see I marked up emotions like dread and guilt, because that is what John Willey was feeling. I agree with Elena Pierazzo when she talks about how uploading a document on the web requires much more and different things compared to a published document.  This is because editors need to do much more like markups and what exactly they need to include and exclude. I also agree with her that there is so much more that one can do with a computer compared to a published document. Coding allows us to mark emotions, places, people, dates, and much more up in order to organize information that would not be available on the computer.  

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Blog #4

Blog #4

These past couple weeks, Jacob and I used Oxygen XML editor tools to mark-up our sections of the John Willey transcription. We did this by using tags to give a category for each significant word; for example, we categorized names, emotions, and places. This taught me more about each specific word, whereas with distant reading I was just given a general overview of my text. By paying attention to the categories frequently appearing, and the words within those categories, I gained a better understanding of the context in which Willey lived. One example of this is when studying Willey’s emotions, he mostly had positive, happy words described of how . However, when looking at his health, it was mostly negative terms representing illness and suffering. Putting these two together you can see Willey was dealing with illness, however, maintained a positive outlook on his life to those around him.

Through working on this process with my peers, I learned a bit about how editorial boards are produced. One issue my group and I had was how to maintain consistency of our tags when we each work on different sections. One particular category that we had trouble with was tagging “rolename” vs. “persname.” For example, we had to choose if Lord, God, saviour and Jesus are “persnames” or “rolenames.” However, as Pierazzo states, “if scholars as competent readers agree on something, then by this definition that thing is objective” (466). Therefore, we had to choose this difference on our own, and agreed that Jesus, Savior, and God would be “rolenames” while Jesus would be a “persname.” This made sense to me and my group, because many people have different definitions of who God is, whereas Jesus was known to be a person, just with differing views of his ability. Pierazzo refers to “the process of selection is inevitably an interpretative act” (465). I can definitely relate to that, as me and my group certainly interpreted how we felt our tags would be most useful and make the most sense.

When referring to digital versions of text, Elena Pierazzo proposes the question: “Do they represent an advancement of textual scholarship or just a translation of the same scholarship into a new medium?” (463). Through my first read through the text, I would have said that digital texts were virtually the same as printed. However, with printed texts there is no way to dig deeper into the reading. This allows for scholars to gain the best, most thorough understanding of the text. Specifically, being able to use tools like Oxygen XML editor allowed me to dig deep into the meaning of each specific word. There is no better way to gain a thorough knowledge of a text than specifically analyzing each word read.

file:///Users/tylergeorge/Downloads/HUMN100_Moravian-TEI/HTML/index.html

 

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Blog #3 contextual research

Paige Whitney’s Blog 3

When examining history, timelines are very important because they allow people to see major changes over an extended period of time in chronological order. Timelines are arranged in an organized way that make it easy and efficient to work with when looking back through history. The small passages about a specific date or time period are very informational. With the advancing technology, timelines now offer pictures and other forms of media to help the viewer imagine the time and place of the event.

Hailey and I formed a timeline of Harriett Lees’s life and included three major dates: her birth, marriage, and death. We gathered more relevant information to Harriett Lees’s life in attempt to make comparisons and connections. When we furthered our research on her hometown, Leominster, we found a lot of interesting and relevant information. This is an example of the geographic mode of representation.

Other major occurrences we came across when researching were the Industrial Revolution, Leamington spa, and lung sickness, also known as tuberculosis. Hailey and I used chronological mode of representation when analyzing our timeline. For example, the timeline allowed us to make the connection and understand Harriett Lees suffering and death from tuberculosis. When deepening our research on the Leamington Spa, we learned that they were seen as healthy places where sick people would go to receive spa waters, doctors, and other medicinal purposes. Again, this allowed us to find a connection between civilians in Great Britain at the time and Harriett Lees.

Tuberculosis was a serious sickness in the nineteenth century and affected many young people.
Photo of the Leamington Spa that is shown in our timeline.

I have learned so much by reading Grafton’s introduction about timelines and going through the process of making one. The use of a timeline has taught me how to make connections between events during a time period in history. It has also allowed me a greater understanding of Harriett Lees’s life.

[iframe src=’https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=13LSz87T6SWQHJEAbTZE6ZBNhhtDZGD5hMGe6mzC-SSY&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650′ width=’100%’ height=’650′ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen frameborder=’0′></iframe]

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Blog #2

Blog 2

For my first time transcribing a memoir, my group and I transcribes a memoir written by the kids of a man named John Wiley.  The memoir is written after the death John Wiley in order to remember in his life. It first starts off by introducing John Wiley and  his family stating that his mother died when he was very young, his father was a member in the congregation for 66 years, he had a brother that was also a member of multiple congregations, and then he also had his sister.  The memoir then describes his early life being a favorite of his teachers, but when moving to the city to start a career he also started to enjoy life and, “sinful pleasure” (3). Around the age of 15 he did not want anything to do with God.  He soon went to London and that is when he decided that he needed to change the way he was living and turn to God. He became a laborer at the Kingwood congregation and started to teach the children there. Shortly after being welcomed into the congregation as a laborer he had his first communion and was visited with a vision of Jesus Christ.  John Wiley devoted himself more to the Church at this time but also started to face hardships with his health. After teaching at the Kingwood Congregation he then was a teacher in Mirfield for several years and then also started to preach the gospel. After several more years of preaching he finally became ordained, but his health was quickly deteriorating.  John Wiley died still proclaiming his devotion to the Lord.

After reading the memoir it is hard not to ask myself, “What were the other family members doing at this time, and what were they feeling?”.  This is written by the children of John Wiley and they seem to be okay with his death since he will be closer to God whom John Wiley devoted much of his life too.  The children writing this memoir do not seem as if they are grieving his death but more celebrating his life. There are also some holes in the story, and I feel like there are parts missing when talking about his mental state.  In no instance do they talk about how worried they were, they always seemed to be positive throughout his whole life.

 

When looking at the document through voyant it helps organize keywords through visual images and much more.  In the John Wiley memoir the 5 most common words are years, time, great, lord, and life.  Lord and life appears a good amount in the memoir since it is about John Wiley’s life and religion played a big part of it.  When talking about time, it referred to time he spent in different places, and years referred to the same thing and also ages of people.  The word great was connected to various sentences and there was no clear pattern.

Above is a visual tool on voyant that allows the viewer to see the most frequent words.  When you put your mouse over one of the words it also highlights other words it is connected to in the document.

Above is the visual tool called “Cirrus” and it again highlights the keywords in the document in a visual image that would be able to be shown to anyone.

Above is a visual tool called “knots” and it has a line for a certain keyword, and every time the word is used the line bends a little bit making a knot.