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The full transcription which I entered into Voyant had a total of 3,807 words with 796 unique word forms. There are an average of 1,269 words per sentence. Visualization tools like Voyant make texts much more understandable. Our Moravian memoirs were challenging to grasp, and so using Voyant helped me greatly. Voyant allowed me to interact with the text in a new way and helped me to answer our research question of how religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription. The Cirrus word cloud and the Corpus Terms allowed me to view the frequency of words in the text. The most frequent words in the corpus are heart, times, time, poor and love. The Cirrus word cloud presents frequently used words in  larger text for emphasis. This is a practice of spatial reading, which I found to be very helpful. Seeing texts in visual form allowed me to view the text more clearly. As Whitley explains, “such visualizations help us to perceive patterns in data that we might otherwise miss” (187). The Corpus Terms provided me with data that showed exactly how many times each word was used in the document. It was interesting to see that the word “heart” was used 31 times and that “Jesus” was used 13 times. These tools exposed the very religious nature of the text. “You find your perspective broadened through a series of unexpected discoveries” (185). Through Voyant, I was able to participate in Distant Reading, a concept explained in the Whitley text. Through Distant Reading, I was able to make connections and see the greater picture rather than closely reading every text and miss important aspects of the memoir. I might not have been able to draw such conclusions about Tippet’s memoir through reading it plainly without Voyant. These tools “challenge us to read texts differently than we otherwise would” (186).  The bubble tool shows the key words which are most frequently used as the ones with biggest bubbles which makes it easy to visualize rather than reading terms off of a list. I like the visualization tools because they allow me to understand the information better.

Tippet was born in 1711 in the Parish of Bitton. He discusses his struggles in his family life. His father died when he was quite young, and he relied on God to get him through this massive loss.  It seems that he is troubled and due to some dark statements throughout the piece.  He mentions that he, “wishes he was never born”. He criticizes himself extensively and describes his reliance on God in order to move past issues in his earlier life. By asking ourselves the question of ‘how does religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription’ we are able to analyze and understand the writing better. This question also helped us to compare Samuel Tippet’s memoir to Esther Latrobe’s memoir. For the Esther Latrobe memoir, the key terms were lord, dear, god, let and savior which is why our research question on religion pertains to their piece as well. The key terms for the pieces combined are Lord,time, heart, dear, and oh. The many tools available in Voyant allowed me to analyze and understand these memoirs. Tippet’s memoir is much shorter than Latrobe’s. Latrobe’s memoir is a much longer piece with 8,460 words. Using some of the tools such as terms berry, tells the Voyant user that the word ‘God’ was used 26 times in the Latrobe memoir.

http://humn10001fa2018.courses.bucknell.edu/files/2018/09/voyant-screenshot1.pdf

http://humn10001fa2018.courses.bucknell.edu/files/2018/09/voyant-screenshot2.pdf

http://humn10001fa2018.courses.bucknell.edu/files/2018/09/voyant-screenshot3.pdf

 

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Blog #2

After transcribing Samuel Tippet’s piece with my group members, we came up with a research question that we felt was appropriate. Our research question was:

How does religion and faith play a role in Samuel Tippet’s transcription?

Tippet’s piece begins with him describing himself. He was born in 1711 in the Parish of Bitton. He also describes his family life and his challenges. His father had died when he was very young, and he turned to God during this period of hardship. Personally, I think he is a little troubled and very dark because several times throughout the pieces he “wishes he was never born” and questions himself what life would be like without him. He criticizes, and self scrutinizes himself and all of the mistakes that he has made throughout his life. Throughout the piece, he describes how he turns to God because of the mistakes he had made in his earlier life.

By asking ourselves this question, it helps the reader or transcriber understand the piece more and analyze it better. When comparing our piece (Samuel Tippet) to another piece, the research question also came into play. The research question also applied to the Esther Latrobe’s memoir.

When using Voyant, each memoir’s key terms comes up. For our piece, the key terms were heart, times, time, poor, and love. For the Esther Latrobe memoir, the key terms were lord, dear, god, let and savior which is why our research question on religion pertains to their piece as well. The combined key terms for the pieces are Lord, heart, time, dear, and oh. Using Voyant, there are many tools available that help you decipher and analyzed a piece. For our piece (Samuel Tippet), it is much shorter than the Latrobe Memoir. Samuel Tippet’s piece had a little around 4,000 words (3,806 words to be exact). In our piece, there was almost no punctuation which made the words/sentence equal to 1,268. The Latrobe’s statistics are more accurate because of the use of punctuation. It was a much longer piece with 8,460 words. The words\sentence was 24.6 which seems to make a lot more sense. Using some of the tools such as terms berry, it tells the Voyant user that the word ‘God’ was used 26 times in the Latrobe memoir. Using the bubble tool, the key words that are most frequently used are the ones with biggest bubbles which makes it easy to tell and visualize instead of just reading terms off of a list. Personally, I like the visualization tools the most because it helps me understand recognize the key terms in a piece better. Other tools such as ‘Grid Tools’ seem very standard to me and have the terms in a chart. Attached, I included a few photos of the tools I used with Voyant.

 

 

 

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Esther Latrobe Voyant Tools

In Esther Latrobe’s memoir, as the reader, we learn that Esther Latrobe was born at Bristol on June 7th, 1802 into a loving family of five brothers and two parents. As she grew up she battled many illnesses such as the measles. To add to Esther’s rough upbringing, her mother passed when Esther was eleven years old. She then spent a lot of time in a dear place, Tytherton. She still had battles with illnesses such as rheumatic fever, which often required the Lord’s spirits to restore her as her medical assistants could not. Because of this attachment with her saviour she put her heart into the Lord. She had a deep connection with her faith that developed from a young age into her adulthood. Esther Latrobe then gave birth to a boy which caused her to become very sick. The way she connected with the Lord made her fear of death simmer. She felt comfort with her loved ones by her side as she faded into life with the Lord, death. She died at the age of 28.

With the use of Voyant Tools I was able to, as Frank Moretti states “step back and look at the broad patterns that emerge” (Whitley 188). These tools allowed me to see the most frequent words as well as the trends in the text. These tools gave me new perspective on the memoir including a broad view on the answer to our research question. Our research question was how did Esther Latrobe’s relationship with God affect her lifestyle, and help her recover from such illnesses and hardships. Seeing the frequency of the word “Lord” and “spirits” helped draw conclusions on how big an influence these had during this medical crisis of her life. Although it didn’t draw in specifically on how the Lord and spirits impacted her life as that would require a closer reading of her memoir, it was mentioned enough for the reader to realize that it played a big role.

 

With the ability of Voyant Tools I was able to see that the most frequent words were “lord”, “oh”, “dear”, “god” and “heart” (which is tied with “let” and “said”) respectively. Being able to see this showed what had the biggest influence in Esther’s life as she had the most to say about it. Even better, the context on Voyant Tools allows you to see to the left and right of the word which allows you to see the context of the Lord in Esther’s life. Being able to see every single occurrence of the word allows you to see much more than the human eye could pick up on. Also the list allows you to compare each occurrence of the word on a visual chart in a very efficient matter that the human could not do alone.

Using the available tools in Voyant Tools helps “identify the patterns of meaning in large and potentially unwieldy texts” (Whitley 198). Word clouds allow you to “spatially read a large body of text involving an interesting back-and-forth between close and distant reading” (Whitley 200). Having these tools helped draw large conclusions about the text which mainly relate back to her beliefs about Lord. Along with Tippett’s memoir, the Lord impacted the lives of many of this time period which shows how important religion was. “Lord” and “Saviour” were frequently used in both memoirs. Using visual tools such as bubblelines, wordcloud, cirrus, bubbles, and frequency grids provides visualizations about the text without reading the entire text. Being able to draw conclusions helps analyze not only Esther’s memoir but also all Moravian memoirs and that time period as a whole. 

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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.