Tag: #EstherLatrobe

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final blog Uncategorized

The Final Blog Post

To begin, this was a long and interesting journey in making the Esther Latrobe memoir into many things like the transcription, the timeline, a story map and etc. All of these things that the class did was pretty unique and once in a lifetime experience. However, there were some difficulties in making this all happen. An example can be on the first time the whole class started doing transcriptions on the memoir they all received, and how most of our pages were so blurry that no know could transcribe it. Luckily we had a person named Lorraine Parsons who is a Librarian and Archivist at Church House at the London Headquarters of the Moravian Church in the British Province. She was able to get high quality pictures of Esther Latrobe memoir in a matter of days, which were really clear to see.  

To begin, in doing our website, my group wanted something appeal to the eye when visiting the site itself. In order to that we had to come has a group to see what fits to our style and to theme of our memoir. We played around with the website for a bit and tried to see how everything worked for all us, but in choosing our theme to our website in the first day of this assignment the website did not work properly at all. Luckily we had the help Carrie every time we needed help with technology. Once the website problem was finally fixed (which was to get a new theme for the website) we had game plan in what had to do for it. Each member of our team was dedicated to a specific part of the website. One of the task was to included a summary so people could get some background information on Esther’s life and to add our research question and conclusions so people who visited our site would be able understand what our main objective was throughout the whole semester. Each member of my team did amazing in their part in making the website beautiful for many people to see for the future. Also,  having the the opinions from other people that are not from our group were essential to have because even as a group we can make mistakes as a whole in our website and one doesn’t realize that there is one.

These were all the artifacts that my group used in analyzing the memoir: Transcription Desk, Oxygen XML Editor 20.1, Voyant, Timeline, Story Map, Digital Edition, Website. With using Oxygen especially, the process of marking up the transcription that my group made affected our understanding of the text in many levels into understanding it how one would analyze the text. Because there are many things to consider in the sense in what we had categorize as what. For example “God” or “Lord,” these words can have different meanings to it because many people have different opinions on this subject. Is “God or Lord” a human being, is it a thing or is it an idea for many people. There are so many ideas that one has to contemplate to mark it.

Overall, The process of collaborating as an editorial board with my group also changed our understanding of how edited texts are produced. When collaborating with my group one had to keep in mind in we needed to do as a whole. “Decisions about what one should encode and should not encode are to be determined according the purpose of our encoding.” (Pierazzo 469)

As I explained in another blog post, in the memoir that my group worked one there were not many dates on the life of Esther Latrobe. In doing her story map and the timeline of Esther Latrobe it was mostly about the sicknesses she faced during her life, how she always prayed for god for forgiveness and etc. This relates back to our research question which was, “How did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships?” The reason we choose this as our question is that as a group we noticed that Esther was very devoted to her religion and she unfortunately spent most of her short life ill.

Also, there was a comment from one of my group members that got us thinking how the traveling information is not represented in the timeline or in the memoir. It does tells us where she goes, but it does explain how long it took to get there, the method she got there and her experiences she had to face when journeying to a place. Latrobe journey consisted of her being born in Bristol, England in 1802 then moving Tytherton, England in 1820. Later on moving to Gracehill, Ireland to become a teacher and finally settling in Ayr, Scotland where she died in peace.  This journey she had must have been a long one for her because in the age of existence she did not the luxury that many humans have now in getting to one place to another.

Furthermore, this whole timeline lets us perceive the journey one takes in ones own life. However, this timeline has its own limits in how one can convey the journey of someones life with limited amount of information that was given in our memoir for Esther Latrobe. “Each artifact (memoir, timeline and etc)  would constitute a separate record anchored in time and space, thus allowing us to keep them in a relationship, and each layer would contain the unique view overtime of an individual or a social unit.” (Bodenhamer 27)  With that in mind one can never know exactly how things truly happen to a specific person like Esther Latrobe. One can never know if she actually took a regular boat to go Ireland or Scotland, she might have swam all the way there or gone with pirates because this was an era of pirates.

In the end, one can learn a lot from other people especially from one’s own team, from other teams, from professors  and even Esther Latrobe. Even though she had a short lived life, she kept persevered to live on everyday with the intent of helping others and loving those around her. I am glad to have read her story because it made me relearn about life again.

http://latrobehumn100.blogs.bucknell.edu/digital-edition-2/

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Blog #5 Uncategorized

Blog post #5

With the whole process of this timeline for Esther Latrobe there has been many revelations on things that came up during the making of the timeline. As Bodenhamer explains it in his article, ” we recognize our representations of space as value laden guides  to the world as we perceive it, and we understand how they exist in constant tension with other representations from different places, at different times, and even at the same time.”(14) This whole timeline lets us perceive the journey one takes in ones own life. However, this timeline has its own limits in how one can convey the journey of someones life with limited amount of information that was given in our memoir for Esther Latrobe. “Each artifact (memoir, timeline and etc)  would constitute a separate record anchored in time and space, thus allowing us to keep them in a relationship, and each layer would contain the unique view overtime of an individual or a social unit.” (27)

With spatial thinking includes processes that support exploration and understanding. Also, it help us visualizes relations, imagines transformations from one scale to another, creates a new viewing perspective on what we are able to see, and helps us remember images in places and spaces. Spatial thinking also allows us to externalize these ideas by creating representations such as a map timelines for us to understand the journey of story.

In the memoir that my group worked one there were not many dates on the life of Esther Latrobe. It was mostly about the sicknesses she faced during her life, how she always prayed for god for forgiveness and etc. There was a comment from one of my group members that got us thinking how the traveling information is not represented in the timeline or in the memoir. It does tells us where she goes, but it does explain how long it took to get there, the method she got there and her experiences she had to face when journeying to a place. Latrobe journey consisted of her being born in Bristol, England in 1802 then moving Tytherton, England in 1820. Later on moving to Gracehill, Ireland to become a teacher and finally settling in Ayr, Scotland where she died in peace.  This journey she had must have been a long one for her because in the age of existence she did not the luxury that many humans have now in getting to one place to another.

Overall, the experience of transcribing the memoir of Esther Latrobe was an experience of a life time. “All spaces contain embedded stories on what has happened there. These stories are both individual and collective, and each of them link geography (space) and history (time).” (16)

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/f3dca7a4d193ca671fee0fb5c4ff5c7d/the-life-of-latrobe/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″></iframe]

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Blog #5

Blog #5

I didn’t expect mapping Esther Latrobe’s journey to be as insightful as it turned out to be. For me personally, I know that I have room to grow in the subject matter of geography. I have always had a terrible sense of direction. I also believe that I am not up to speed on geography. I am slowly learning how important and useful knowing the spatial differences between locations is as “we live in a physical world and routinely use spatial concepts of distance and direction to navigate our way through it” (Bodenhamer 14). When I was reading Esther Latrobe’s memoir I found myself reading the location of places she was moving to and leaving from, but never visualizing it. I read the place names and kept reading, not thinking that that would change how I think of Esther’s life. I thought I was close reading however, Storymapping JS gave me a new perspective of how much more I could learn from just a single location. Knowing where these major locations in Esther’s life were gave me a new perspective on how far she was truly traveling. As David Bodenhamer summarizes “human activity is about time and space” therefore using resources to “manage, relate, and query events, as well as to visualize them” is important for many aspects of piecing together history (Bodenhamer 22). I never had a true grasp on her journey until this experience of mapping the physical space.

For my Storymap JS I chose the few places Esther mentioned in her memoir as they all marked important places in her life. Her birth and death marked the start and finish of her journey. The Gracehill and Ayr were two places that Esther moved to on her journey that she spoke highly of in her memoir. There were significant events that all stacked on top of each other to form Esther’s path. These four places were far apart yet all marked important changes in Esther’s life.

After creating my story map I saw the physical space between Tytherton and Gracehill and had a few questions for Esther. I was curious as to why Esther didn’t include more about her journey in her memoir as the distance between these locations was so great. I would expect her to have life altering experiences along the way. The space difference between these two locations is much bigger than I thought from the lack of attention given to this experience in her writing. I now feel like she left parts of her life out of her memoir and there is more to what shaped Esther as an individual.

In general, creating a map can broaden a readers’ perspective. Often times, as I was, readers are more focused on the text rather than the actual location of places. Knowing the specific place at that time period gives plenty of context for the event. For historians this may give reasons and explanations for certain events. If there was tension in a nearby country or with a certain group within a country, at the same time and place, conclusions can be drawn. Piecing together history is much easier when you know the places things happened in relation to others. Bodenhamer summarizes this nicely by saying that landscape of culture and place is a powerful tool in “locating historical and cultural exegesis more explicitly in space and time” (Bodenhamer 28). These tools that allow us to “provide geographical context and depth to an expert interpretation of the past” are extremely useful especially when trying to understand the cause of certain effects (Bodenhamer 28).

[iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/ba6462a72c3fcb7093a45648ddf37add/latrobe-carly-pavoni/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]

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Blog #4

Blog Post #4

Transcribing Esther Latrobe’s memoir has opened the doors to a deeper understanding of her life. At this point in the course being able to distant read gave me information from a bird’s view to summarize a large portion of text such as our 44 pages of Esther’s memoir. However, now being able to read through each word and designate a tag for it gave me a new meaning of Esther’s memoir. Although it was a unique and challenging experience, I have learned a lot from being on an editors side during this process.

Designating a tag for each word is not as easy as it may sound. As a group, we had to learn how to determine the labels for controversial words. We questioned if we should tag “Lord” and “God” as people. After reading Elena Pierazzo’s article I realized that our group was not alone with these debates on how and what to choose to tag. She states that “the question how to choose” is common in this process and we “must have limits” (466). To figure out these limits our group came to the conclusion to tag people if it was capitalized within the text. We believed that Esther meant these religious figures to be people if she capitalized it. Looking this carefully as the text made me question what Esther was trying to refer to, which gave me a new insight into her life. She believed Lord and God were people as she was very spiritual. Without making these editorial decisions and reading on a micro scale, I don’t think I would have as good of an idea of her beliefs as a person.

Another editorial decision our group came across was how to differentiate between tagging an emotion and health related word. Esther was sick the majority of her life for her memoir. This caused a lot of words to be related to illness, symptoms and feelings. Our group had to decide what “decision will reflect the purpose and intended use of the transcription” (471). We made rules in our group google docs to clarify and keep constant throughout our encoding process. Pierazzo’s statement “To achieve the purpose of the edition and meet the editors’ needs, one needs to ask which features bear a cognitive value, that is, which are relevant from a scholarly point of view” made me realize the true importance of what my group, as editors, were doing (469). If there were questions on if something should be tagged as an emotion or health, the context of the word was read aloud and decided as a majority vote. Whatever one had more of an importance for the overall meaning of the text was typically decided.

Having team members to double check you and clarify any confusions is a big help however working with a group takes a variety of large types of communication. For our coding of our memoir to be successful and meet our overall purpose, we had to be tagging the same types of things.