Tag: digital

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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/

 

 

 

 

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Uncategorized

Blog Post #5

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After creating a timeline as well as mapping the memoir, it tells my group members and a lot about our memoir as I’m sure other students would agree as well. As I described in Blog Post #4, creating the timeline helped me better analyze the story and have all of the information organized in a timely fashion by using chronological order. The creation of the timeline also helped significantly in creating my story map. I found myself frequently referring back to our timeline for reference.

More importantly, the story map tied everything together for me.” We are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order out world.” (Bodenhamer 14) Everything in this class is completely new to me on analyzing a memoir. In the past, I would normally read and maybe reread a second time in order to point out key words and understand. With the process of tagging, transcribing, creating a timeline, and lastly a story map I truly have broken down the whole memoir. With the story map, by physically looking on a map I understood where Samuel Tippet had traveled during his lifetime and where the places he went to exactly where. Unlike many other memoirs other students had, he had not traveled much. This made the story map process a bit easier, because I was able to use one map to plot all of my points besides the city of London which was cut off a bit. Some students in class had characters in their memories that traveled all throughout Europe and even globally. Before reading Samuel Tippet’s memoir, I had no idea where Bristol or Kingswood were. Tippet traveled around England, but most of his places that he visited were relatively close to each other besides London! Some events were his birth, Hanham Mount (spiritual realization), and Bristol. Bristol is also where he pledged allegiance to God.

Personally, I found it very interesting to learn about because two summers ago I attended the London School of Economics and fell in love with London. It was my first time there, and I will definitely be back. Unfortunately, I had not gotten to see or experience the countryside of England. I also thought it was cool that Professor Faull was born here as well as she had great background info on this area!

While creating the story map, I used media from Google Images as well as some of our media that we used in our timeline. “Spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product and determinant of change.” (Bodenhamer 16) The timeline helped me describe some of the events at each place on our map and make it a story. Another part that helped me was creating the Google Fusion table about what was used most in our memoir which was probably people and place rather than emotion. What I want our story to tell is that throughout Samuel Tippet’s life he visited a few places. However, through these series of events especially the Parish of Bitton. Tippet realizes how important God and religion are to him here. He later devotes his life to God and realizes that his prior mistakes made can be amended and forgiven through religion. He becomes very spiritual throughout his lifetime. Mapping memoirs ties all of our prior steps together and creates a story through small descriptions, an exact location placed on a map as well as photographs to depict the place. A quote that I really liked from the reading was “In practice, critics claimed, evidence about the world depends upon the perspective of the observer, a distinction that GIS obscures.” (Bodenhamer 19)

 

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Blog #4

Blog 4

 anderson_annaRosina print The process of marking up my transcription has allowed me to become intimate with my text. It allowed me to be able to understand my text. Marking up my transcription feels as though I am annotating it; I was able to interpret things about Anna Rosina Anderson that I would not have been able to do had I not marked up the text. I was able to understand the role religion played in her life through the amount of times that the word Jesus, god, savior came up. Through marking it up, I was able to learn how often certain words were used, which led me to the conclusion that I drew. In all, I feel as though the process of marking up my transcription has allowed me to be able to understand my text on a level that i otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.The process of collaborating as an editorial board has allowed me to be able to understand how difficult that the decisions can be. I didn’t appreciate the production of edited texts. I always thought that it was pretty easy to be able to produce these texts. However i now know that it is not as easy a task as I had once thought. I worked alone, but I was soon able to discover that group collaboration is much harder. I also had some of the same problems when it came to editorial decisions. One of the things I had to decide was whether or not I wanted to tag every pronoun that referred to a person that I had previously tagged. I decided not to tag every pronoun because I felt as though someone looking would see that a name is tagged and would know who the pronoun referred to. I did not feel as though it was necessary to have dozens of tags in such a short succession all referring to the same person. anderson_annaRosina print 2

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Blog #1

Blog #1: On Material and Digital Archives

After visiting several websites that are based on archival materials and browsing through the DH project sample book, I have been able to explore many DH projects. While browsing, I have seen the advantages and disadvantages of creating a digital artifact from archival documents. Specifically, many artifacts are in remote archives and only certain scholars are permitted access. By creating a digital artifact, the documents become widely available for research for people who are restricted by both travel and accreditation. Additionally, these documents are often delicate, sensitive to light, and require extremely special handling. But, when these artifacts are digitized, they no longer require such delicate conditions. This allows the researchers to put more effort into analyzing the document, rather spending time trying to maintain adequate conditions for the document.

On the other hand, there are some disadvantages. Specifically, when an archival document can be accessed digitally, it takes away from the special experience of traveling to the archive and handling the actual document. When a document is digitized, the document is often static, presented as a photograph or transcription. This presentation could potentially make a researcher miss an important aspect of the document, such as something that is written more lightly, that they would have been privy to if they were in the presence of the actual document.

As I explored the Moravian Lives projects, the biggest similarity I found was with another DH project, “Transcribe Bentham”. Both projects utilized crowdsourcing. The projects don’t have a sole contributor, but rather many. This method allows for more transcriptions to become available in a shorter amount of time, simply because so many people are able to be working on the project at once.

In the digital age, we are increasingly interacting with textual material on the screen more than on the printed page. Personally, my high school utilized the “iPad Program” and all our readings were digital. Because the interaction with the digital material is overpowering interaction with the printed material, our research practices changed. Post-It notes and highlighters have been replaced with digital annotations. 

Additionally, our physical and emotional relationships with our objects of study are drastically shifting in a digital age. Because archival documents are more accessible now digitally, researchers lose a special bond with the material that they would have felt had they accessed the material in person. This digital difference causes a slight detachment from their objects of study. The sense of seeing the document on a screen is much different than being able to see and potentially touch the document in real life. 

In the physical archive, there are different sources of knowledge and serendipitous discovery than in the digital archive. In the physical archive, researchers may be more likely to interact with other scholars that are studying a similar topic. Physical archives also offer the “wide-angle perspective” (185) that Whitley spoke about. However digital archives offer a different experience. As Whitley writes, “In browse mode, digital archives allow for a wide-angle perspective on their material by trusting to the wanderings of a curious mouse clicker. In search mode, the hope is that a search engine will serendipitously discover information that a browsing scholar or student might otherwise miss” (186). I would not say that the digital archive is better than the physical archive and vice versa, just that the two offer very different experiences. In my opinion, a combination of both may be the best approach for a browsing scholar or student.