Tag: Digital Edition

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

Transcribing the Moravian manuscripts was a very interesting, as well as a rewarding experience. My task was to transcribe the Moravian manuscripts to create a digital edition by using a photo of the original archival document from archives in Bethlehem and London. To transcribe, I utilized the transcription desk on the Moravian Lives website, which was a very neat platform.

At first, the pages I was assigned by my group leader to transcribe seemed daunting. I had not primarily written or read cursive writing since the third grade, so reading the Moravian manuscripts was difficult at first. I felt a lot of pressure to be accurate in my transcription because I knew that if I transcribed something incorrectly, there would be negative effects on my work later in the course and the research project as a whole. Over time, recognizing words and abbreviations became easier, allowing me to transcribe the documents faster. The group setting made it particularly simple for me to get help when I was stuck on a word or unsure of an abbreviation. Specifically, my team (Brendan, Olivia, and Ethan) would help one another whenever they ran into trouble and look over each other’s documents to ensure accuracy. It was great to have such a strong group, especially when I just needed a second pair of eyes (and sometimes third) on my document.

The pages I was assigned detailed the lives of Joesph Lingard and Henry Unger. Over the days I spent transcribing the pages, I feel that I have been able to better understand the Moravians because I walked in the shoes of both Henry and Joesph. I look forward to the work to come as I will able to delve deeper into the lives of Henry and Joesph by doing text analysis and mapping.

My Transcriptions:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17GZrXSICM6RDmdVB0SJjc1tS1njQ8CnGb-IUI9HrVKw/edit

Joesph Lingard Page 01

Joesph Lingard Page 02

Joesph Lingard Page 03

Joesph Lingard Page 04

Henry Unger Page 02 & 03

 

 

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Blog #1

Blog #1 – Caleb Broughton

Often times when historians are analyzing an archive, specifically one that is large in size and may take a long time to analyze fully, they run into some trouble with a term that Micki Kaufman uses in her project Quantifying Kissinger; “information overload.” This over abundance of information usually requires multiple different tools and methods for analysis, and when historians are working on this for hours at a time, the work can become tedious, frustrating, and sometime unproductive. This leads to spending more time looking at a screen and figuring out how to use certain methods and tools, rather than focusing attention on the physical archive itself.

Creating a digital artifact from archival documents gives way to so many advantages. First of all, the majority of archival documents are in rough condition, and are very fragile to the touch. If digital artifacts were not a thing, most of what we know about history from these archival documents would be unknown. Some documents are illegible to the human eye but with technology, historians are able to recreate a lot of these archival documents.

Image result for archived documents digital humanities

I think it is true that our physical and emotional relationships to our objects of study are shifting as we move deeper into a digital age. I think they are getting stronger and more intelligent, because a lot of the content that is being created connects directly to our natural human instincts, and can be very beneficial for people. As Whitley says in his paper, “Humans are quite adept at perceptual visual cues and recognizing subtle shape differences…humans are pre-wired for understanding and visualizing shape.” Because of this natural ability that humans possess, these digital tools that transform textual patterns into visual shapes naturally help people grasp certain skills of shape perception. There is even speculation that because this portion of the mind is being activated by these digital tools, it could potentially be accelerating the reading process.Image result for textarc

Whitley talks about creating these things called “concept shapes” out of texts,  to graphically represent data patterns. In order to better understand the content of a document, a group of scholars came up with a method for representing texts as “semi-spherical objects in a virtually rendered three dimensional space.” Wherever there are patterns in the text, the spherical objects “blend together to create a variety of quasi-organic shapes.” This method is one that seeks to help readers identify different patterns that would otherwise be overlooked if it was in a large body of text. For this, I believe it is true to say that digital versions of material texts highlight physical elements of texts that might otherwise pass unremarked.

One way to create online reading interfaces that can more closely approximate the experience of reading physical materials, that Whitley talks about in his paper is TextArc. It is an experiment in spatial reading, and is based off of the idea that seeing and reading are two complimentary processes. Whitley describes it basically as a “balancing act between reading and seeing.” As people are experiencing the text visualization, the eyes and the mind “scan for ideas, then follow the ideas down to where and how they appear in the text”.

 

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Practice Blog

Bhagawat’s Practice Blog

The Six Degree of Francis Bacon project was founded by professors at Carnegie Mellon. It creates a network map for Francis Bacon, these people he knew or worked with. Through these networks, we are able to not only see how they are connected to Bacon, but also see their own networks. It allows us to see the shared network between people as well as a personal network of people such as King James I. The primary digital humanities focus of this project is visualization as it allows us to see the network and select different people and things. This project does use crowdsourcing as well as a statical analysis to find these connections. People can contribute information and connections to the project to make a more dense map of the connections. The perfect choice to display relationships between a large group of people is a network map. The connections represent the relationship between Bacon and others in an understandable manner.

Francis Bacon Network

 

Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscript is a project that preserve and archive Jane Austen’s fiction writing. It allows readers to see the writing in her own handwriting as well as a digital version. This project preserves and digitalizes the writings, making it easier for readers to access the writings. It brings all of the scattered collections to one place. It collects rare readings that are in libraries and private collection and allows anyone to read them. This way of archiving and digitalization works perfectly with the writings as it allows for more readers to have access to it.