Tag: digital humanities

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

Working with these old memoirs from the Moravian lives projects was very interesting and surprisingly fun.  Being able to read something that was written so long ago was something I have never done, and it was really engaging.  As I read about John Wiley’s life, I was able to imagine his life and almost grow attached to what I was writing down and feel like what I was doing was really important.  Even though reading the piece was engaging and interesting, it presented some challenges. To be able to create a digital text, we had to be able to read what the document said and write down exactly what was written, even if the punctuation or spelling was wrong.  The words were faded and the way that people wrote in the past was a lot different from how people write today. From the way they wrote cursive the their word choice, it was hard to be able to read it at times. Letters like F, T and L were sometimes hard to distinguish, as well as two words close together without a space.  Also, words were misspelled which presented a whole new challenge. We had to type out the misspelling and then correct it, but at times the misspelling was hard to make out what word they were trying to say. Luckily for the John Wiley memoirs, the archivist that had the documents were able to send our group clearer images of the original copies which was a game changer for being able to transcribe.  The help of the professors and also the students that came in to help us was also monumental for being able to transcribe, because their eyes have been trained to read these old documents. We then had to tag different parts of the text and point out a person’s name, dates, places, misspellings, and other things of that nature.

John Wiley Memoir

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Assignment #1

Assignment 1 – John Willey transcription

Link to transcription of the John Willey text (I transcribed pages 16-22):

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

 

The text Rosemary, Jacob and I transcribed was a 19th century England memoir, written by John Willey. We transcribed 22 pages of text, written in cursive, to make the reading more accessible to future scholars. At first, I really struggled with identifying words and letters, leaving question marks on almost 40% of the words on my first page. However, as I went through the transcription process, I became more familiar with Willey’s handwriting. This allowed for me to pick out letters and words much more easily than before. For example, every time Willey wrote “in” he has the dot supposed to be above the “i” over the “n” off to the right. After reading through a lot of text, I eventually realized his writing styles and had a much easier time transcribing Willey’s text. Another issue I encountered was that some of the text was written very lightly, and parts of the image were blurry. However, this was promptly fixed by Professor Faull, by gathering a clearer version of the memoir from the archive. Professor Faull’s accessibility to that was very helpful, and showed me how well the digital humanities community is able to help each other out in completing transcriptions. Lastly, my classmates and professors were extremely helpful in transcribing some words that were unfamiliar to me. Transcribing Willey’s text allows me read it in a way more familiar to me, rather than struggling through reading his old, cursive handwriting.

Through reading Willey’s memoir and noticing frequently appearing words and themes, I was able to recognize the main points Willey portrays. Firstly, Willey speaks of an extremely religious and faithful man. He often speaks of Jesus, love, church and God. Willey describes God and Jesus as his saviour and speaks on how his connection to religion promoted a happy and loving life. Additionally, this man is suffering through a fatal disease throughout the text before passing away at the end. However, his faith allows for a positive outlook on the entire situation. This child of God, as described by Willey, was said to have a happy death. He was relieved from his suffering, and onto spend his after-life with God. Overall, Willey tells a tremendous story about the waning moments of the life of an honorable and faithful man.

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Assignment #1

Assignment #1

I had the opportunity to transcribe quite a few documents within the Moravian Lives project, which I had never done before. At first, I was reluctant to begin reading old cursive handwriting, but once I began the assignment my opinion quickly changed. Through this assignment I was able to read and transcribe the works of Henry Unger, Rosine Tanneberger, and Anna Elizabeth Rauch.

Some of these readings were very difficult to understand, due to the many grammatical mistakes and illegible handwriting, but I enjoyed working through it. Every time that I was able to transcribe a word that gave me difficulty, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied. Once I had all of my documents typed, I then read them over and found myself very interested in what the original authors had written. It really helped my understanding of what the author was trying to convey by reading the documents when they were typed out and “uncoded” in some instances. It was very helpful working in a group for this project because when one of us was troubled by a word or phrase we could work through it together. It made the process easier and more enjoyable.

In the Henry Unger document, I was able to read a brief account of the life and faith of Ober Peyle from 1721 to 1750. It was a little confusing to understand, but I believe that Henry Unger was speaking about him as a sinner who was forgiven and joined his congregation. In the second document I transcribed, I learned about the life Rosine Tanneberger and her journey to find rest for her “soul.” Lastly, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Brendan on the Anna Elizabeth Rauch document. We both found this document to be very hard to understand, but concluded that it was an account of her journey from Jamaica to Mesopotamia.

 

Henry Unger pg. 1

Rosine Tannerberger

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg.6

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg. 7

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg. 8

Anna Elizabeth Rauch pg. 9

 

Google Doc 

 

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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.