Tag: distant reading

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Blog #4

Blog Post #4

Through transcribing Elizabeth Grundy’s memoir I have gained a strong grasp of her life. Distant reading has allowed me to take the 23 pages of her memoir and condense the writing into a short summary. Additionally, creating tags for each individual words had given the memoir a completely different feel when you read through it. These tags help to clarify Grundy’s writing, which helps the reader follow along better and gain a stronger understanding of the memoir. Creating tags was a difficult and tedious process, and some hard decisions had to be made, but they bring so much to the writing that it is worth the process.

For me the process of marking up my transcription has given me a deeper understanding of the text, and has allowed me to get a better feel for what Grundy’s life was like. Adding tags to our group’s transcribed memoir is what Pierazzo calls a diplomatic edition. “A published version of a transcription which reproduces as many of the characteristics of the original document as the medium permits or as the project requires”(Pierazzo, 473). It was tough to choose which words to tag and which ones to leave out. The tags give the transcriptions a lot more detail that makes it easier for the reader, but if you overuse the tags, their purpose will diminish. “An electronic edition is like an iceberg, with far more data potentially available than is actually visible on the screen, and this is at the same time a great opportunity and a temptation to overdo things. When so many possibilities exist, there is a danger of technological considerations of what can be done taking priority over intellectual considerations of what is actually desirable or necessary in any particular case”(Pierazzo, 467). Our group in particular had a problem with deciding whether or not we should tag the words “brother”, “sister”, “son”, and “daughter”. Our transcriptions were already filled with tags and we felt that these words would not be beneficial as we would  be overusing tags. In almost every instance in Grundy’s memoir where one of these words appears, Grundy explains who it is that she is talking about so there is no confusion, which made it easier to decide that we should leave these words untagged. Creating this diplomatic edition has added a lot of nice features to my groups transcriptions, but there are certain features that inevitably cannot be preserved through the process of transcription. “Some characteristics of the manuscript are irredeemably lost by transcribing it, for instance the variable shape and spacing of handwritten glyphs versus the constant shape of digital fonts or typescripts”(Pierazzo, 464). Aside from this, the entire process of creating a diplomatic edition of Elizabeth Grundy’s original memoir has given me a deep look into her life, and I have a strong understanding of what it was like.

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Blog #2

Blog #2

Research Question: How do the frequent terms within voyant relate to the theme of John Willey’s memoir?

 

The memoir Rosemary, Jacob, and I transcribed is written by John Willey’s children after his death. Willey was a honorable servant of the Lord in the Brn Church. Willey comes from a religious family; his father, brothers, and himself all held active roles in the Church. Unfortunately, John Willey’s mother passed away when he was just six years old. But Willey’s courage and love allowed him to still live a great and loving life. Willey’s eventual passion for religion at 21 years old gave him the faith and love for something greater than himself. Willey attended and taught at religious schools, growing love for his pupils. Eventually, Willey was given the honor of becoming a minister, one of his goals in life. Later, Willey marries a teacher he worked with, named Susan Hutton, whom Willey had four children with. One of his daughters passed away in her early infancy. Despite a long and happy life, Willey suffered through medical issues his last six years prior to death. Most of his vital organs were affected, and Willey was mostly unable to commit to his duty to the church. He maintained a positive outlook on life through his suffering. Willey was still extremely faithful and believed everything would workout well. All he wanted to do was get back to his duty as a minister. The memoir ends with Willey’s family comforting him through song as he passes away. Willey and his family maintain positive up through his death, believing he is leaving his suffering to go be happy with the Lord. Overall, the memoir of John Willey is an excellent story of a man who lived an honorable life as a servant to his Lord, and eventually had his spirits lifted to be with the Lord.

 

The Willey memoir consists of 3,519 words in total. Of those words, 1,106 were described as unique word forms, displaying the complexity of Willey’s texts. Additionally, Willey’s memoir seems to have a pretty standard sentence structure to todays writing, considering the average sentence length of 33.5 words. Through using Whitley’s tool described as distant reading, I was able to see the key patterns emerging in Willey’s text. For example, illey’s frequently appearing words are years, time, great, Lord, life, love and Jesus. This leads me to believe that Willey lived a happy life, filled with faith. Through comparing Samuel Tippett’s memoir with Willey’s on voyant, there are some clear patterns emerging across their lives. For example, both these memoirs are filled with religion. Common words emerge, like Lord and savior, clearly portraying both these men’s passions toward religion. Additionally, love is a word appearing in both texts, perhaps showing that their faith towards religion promoted a sense of love in their lives. Overall, through examining Willey’s and Tippett’s texts, and skimming through a bunch more, there is a clear sense of a passion towards religion in these memoirs. This is very interesting, considering the different locations and time periods these men lived their lives.

 

Visualization, is a tool especially prevalent on voyant, which was introduced to me by the Whitley reading. Almost every tool I worked with on voyant has some form of visualization to it. For example, the cirrus is an excellent resource for compiling all the key terms. Then, using collocates is a great way to further examine which of those words often relate to each other. For example, I noticed that great and years often appeared near each other, as well as savior and Lord. This leads me to believe Willey had great years in his life and viewed his Lord as his savior.

 

Through examining voyant tools, as well as reading through the Willey text, my research question was clearly answered. There is a very clear connection between the frequently appearing words, and the common theme of Willey’s memoir. For example, the words like years, great, Lord, love and Jesus all clearly portray that Willey’s life was a happy one filled with religion. This is reflected in my reading, as Willey devoted his life to his religious workings and seemed to be happy with this choice. Willey also used his faith to maintain happiness in his suffering toward the end of his life. Similarly, Whitley explains how human brains are able to easily notice patterns in their reading. Interestingly, voyant tools put all those patterns in one place, allowing me to notice the same themes I picked up on while reading.

 

 

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Blog #2

Blog 2-Rosemary Rong

The main idea of the Willey memoir is that a faithful priest named John Wiley spent his whole life to be pray. The memoir which was written by Wiley’s children illustrated Wiley’s early life between 1781 and 1793 as bittersweet as his mother died when he was six. Still, he grew up with teacher Bradley ‘s care and love until he was twelve. Two years later, he learnt a trade in Bedford, where he started to question the world and reflect himself as a man with sinfulness. In order to redeem himself, in 1802, he went to Bristol where he saw the Congregation for the first time in his life.  In 1806, he served as a teacher in Mirfield school. About ten years later, he was married to Sgle. Sr. Susan Hutton, a teacher at Gracehill. After the marriage, the couple had four children and lived happily in Ballinderry. In May 1841, he had a violent attack of influenza in Cootehill. In the hope of recovering from his painful illness, he served the Lord and Saviour more faithfully than ever. During the last year of his life, he spent four months near Bally-Castle and returned to Gracehill in October. His wife and the three of his children assembled around his bed to witness his gentle departure from this world in October 1847.

 

Via Voyant, I compared both the Willey memoir and the Harriett Lees memoir as these two memoirs were composed at the same time period and they are from London archives.  In the perspective of lexical, the Lees memoir was written in plenty of long sentences and its average sentence words is 80.7 while Willey memoir’s average sentence words is 33.4. Noticeably, the vocabulary densities of both texts are at almost the same level, the Lees memoir is 0.348 and the Willey memoir is 0.310. Based on the average sentence words, the author of the Lees memoir obtain more written skills than the author of the Willey memoir. And the vocabulary densities justifies this conclusion. However, we cannot be 100 percent confirmed as the total lengths of these two memoirs are different. In the contrast of the Lees’ 2099 words and 731 unique word forms,  the whole text of Willey memoir consists of 3505 words in total and 1087 unique word forms. Apart from that, the Willey’s five most frequent words are years, time, great, lord and time. Two common words between two memoirs are great and time. “Great” is to express the extent of certain events or someone and “time” is to illustrate a person’s life in the chronical way. In the perspective of key words in Willey memoir, through the termberry screen, five key words are congregation, lord,time, great and life.  The following graphs are generated through Voyant. The first one is collocates graphs, which represents a network graph where keywords in green are shown linked to collocates in maroon according Voyant’s tools help page. For example, the word “year” is related to “laborer,” “spent,” “age,” and “life.”  According to Whitley’s reading, the author expects that readers can read the digital reading in two mode: browse mode and search mode. The Voyant provides various visualizations  so that even if a reader may not be able to read the memoir in details, he/she can grab the gist of a memoir directly from dozens of graphs. The second graph is cirrus. The words are in eye-catching colors to impress readers and arouse readers’s interests to read the memoir.  In the Whitley’s reading, it is said that visualizations are intended neither to stand as definitive interpretations of literary texts nor to provide direct answers to research questions. Rather, the goal in visualizing data from a literary text is to spark inqury. Personally speaking, colorful words assembled together pushes me to inquire this memoir deeper. The third graph is scatterplot. I imputted both the whole memoir and one-third of the memoir that I transcribed and Voyant generated this graph. This graph not only confirms that the whole memoir is written in the same style, but also differentiate the part that I transcribed from the whole. This is significant because the reader can expect what distinctive meanings from each part of the memoir.  It also serves the function of wrestling with questions that close reading alone might otherwise be unable to answer mentioned in Whitley’s reading. If scholars confront the problem of comparing  two similar memoirs, then use this graph is a starting point.

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Blog #2

Blog post #2

For the Moravian memoirs the use of the Voyant Tools helps understand more of the idea or the theme of a particular text more easily in one website. In analyzing the text that was given my group has come up with a research question, “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships? ”  There is also a question that I propose and it is, ” Would her values of life be any different if she was put into this time period?” These tools may help us find the answer we need.   However, as Whitley points out “visualizations are intended neither to stand as definitive interpretations of literary text nor to provide direct answers to research question.”(187) 

When looking at the tools that are given it seem that these tools would help us understand more on these research questions. The reason is that many of the traditional tools are usually pen and paper that has only one copy of existence. But in the Digital age that we live, a person is able to access things more quicker and understand the connections of the terms and their usage in that text better and faster. We are able to compare and contrast between text better in finding the differences and “digital technology  (help us) search for patterns and trace broad outlines.” (188)

While using the Voyant tool it has showed the connections of the theme that was around the terms that were commonly used. The key terms that were most frequent in the letters were the Samuel text was lord, time, heart and death. These terms came from the other group that we shared with. By using the cirrus tool it allowed us to visualize the top frequent words in a word cloud. That shows a pattern of religion being the main center of it all. In the Latrobes letters it was about a women who has lived life of misery and sickness in her life, yet having a positive attitude towards her life and to others. Knowing that one day her God will give her a better life after death. With the cirrus tool and mandala tool it allowed me to distinguish the key terms of the Letters in a bigger picture. With key terms being lord, saviuor, dear, god and heart it conveys that most of these texts convey a message that a person life revolves on the teachings of Christianity and what keeps that person living as a good person. There are collocates in this text like, “Dear Saviour let me take my soul at the foot of thy cross,for ever having my eyes fixed on thy sacred body, bearing my sins’ heavy load.”(pg 6) with the Dear and Saviour being next to each other. For example, with the tool of Corpus Collocates it describes  the patterns and amount of times that terms collocate with each other. Being that the most collocate terms that go together are Dear, Saviour and Death. Even though Death is not much of a prevalent word in the Latrobe article. It did have a prevalent theme around it while also giving the same prevalent theme of religion being the main factor of her life. With the Lord being the most frequent term for both text, it describes her wanting advise from God to help her find peace in her life and those around her. One thing to note is that in this letter is that it had more of a emotional story of a person than describing the whole environment.  

In the end, the key terms and the patterns that were shown by the tools give us an understanding of their world and life. It lets us see the prevalent themes of the past that may be common for them, but uncommon for us. As  Whitley would explain it, “visualizations help us perceive patterns in data that we might otherwise miss” (187) in order understand the stories of our past.